Slashdot Mirror
Student Makes a Million Online, Gets Deported
Via Kotaku, a story at the Mainichi daily news about an enterprising exchange student that got himself deported. Wang Yue Si, a Chinese student who went to Japan on a student visa, found himself in need of some spending money. Since he was a gamer, he decided to make some cash by selling virtual items online. He was so successful, the cops noticed. From the article: "He started selling items such as weapons and currency for online games through an Internet auction site in April this year, without obtaining the appropriate residency status. Wang, living in Kumamoto, has admitted that he sold the virtual goods for about 6 million yen ($US 1.3 Million), in violation of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law. A bank worker became suspicious when Wang regularly sent money back home to China and alerted police in August, prompting Kumamoto police officers to investigate the student."
Summary says "6 million yen or $1.3m" .. but 6m yen is only about 50k dollars (1 yen is slightly less then 1 cent in value) .. so .. which is it?
Japan is a fairly xenophobic society, especially towards other east Asians. No sane lawyer will want to fight this. When it comes to immigrants, Japan is a dictatorship(unless you're white.)
If you are on a student visa, you're not supposed to be making money by working, you're supposed to be studying. no I know there are ways around this, but with most of them, if you get caught, you go home.
[what?]
The article says: "A university student from China has been arrested for illegally engaging in business activities outside the restrictions of his student visa, police said." Arrested, not deported.
Of course it's an English summary of a Japanese original. Does anyone here read Japanese well enough to check the original source?
About the discrepancy in the money amounts mentioned in another reply: 6 million yen is what the student has admitted. That's nowhere near $1 million. Police suspect his total profit is 100 million yen, which is near enough $1 million.
Many/most countries with restrictive visas (eg. student/tourist visas) would charge/deport someone for working without suitable work permits. I know people who have been blacklisted from USA (never allowed to even land in transit in USA) for overstaying a visa by one day.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Either way, he made that money fair and square in my opinion (after taxes withheld by the sticky-fingered state of course)
He made it failry in terms of his customers got what they paid for but the authorities are mad because he DIDN'T pay income taxes on it; he was a foriegn exchange student and wasn't supposed to be making any income in the first place.
Here's a fact: In the business world, there is always a high paying job (or venture capital) for someone who has shown they can make money, even if that person has no ethical barriers to speak of.
Sometimes it is because the employer thinks they can temper the lack of ethics, other times it is because that is exactly the type of person they wanted to hire. Why else do people with nasty, back-stabbing personalities get hired?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Before getting too upset about this, wait and see what happens. They find someone who isn't supposed to be working exporting a large amount of money so they arrest him. That isn't surprising. Maybe they'll deport him. Maybe they'll release him. Maybe they'll make him pay income tax on it. For all we know they'll decide that although exporting all that cash looked suspicious, since he didn't actually have a job in Japan he didn't violate his student status. We haven't seen how this will turn out.
As for Japanese immigration, it is true that you don't want to play games with them. That's true in a lot of countries. However, I have to say that in my experience (and I have held research and employment visas as well as tourist visas) Japanese immigration was quite straightforward to deal with and as bureaucracies go not unpleasant. I never thought they were xenophobic or out to screw me. If you follow the rules as best you can they seem to be pretty decent. They do like it if you make it easier for them. For example, I found that they liked it when I took the trouble to fill out forms in Japanese.
"Virtual Enterprise" trick will work only if you receive money in the country where it's registered. So if you have a nice little company in Germany that sells virtual stuff in US, you have to bill your customers from Germany, and receive your funds there.
And if you are in US on tourist visa, you can't keep selling your virtual "German made" stuff on a regular basis, as then you are working in US, and either need to have a local branch or work visa.
Japan did a normal thing in this case -- you don't have work permit, yet regularly cash in cheques? Goodbye!
Otherwise anyone could work as a salesman without any visa, claiming that goods were "made in another country".
Hyperom.com
According to xe.com, 6M yen is about $51600. Still a nice sum for a student, but not even near $1M.
According to TFA, the student is _suspected_ to have earned 150M yen, which translates to $1.29M. This is what the police suspect, and has not been admitted by the student in question nor has this claim been supported by any other evidence.
Editors, even though this is Slashdot please try to do your work. This isn't Digg.
This sig is intentionally left blank