A Japanese yakuza mob boss has been arrested over fraud charges after he signed up for a supermarket loyalty card.

Takuya Machinaga, 73 – reportedly a boss of Japan’s largest and most powerful yakuza organisation – received his card for a Nagoya shop three years ago in 2020.

But he was reportedly seized last week after falling foul of the scheme’s regulations that ban ‘Anti-Social Organisations’.

Because the benefits that come from loyalty cards could qualify as currency, Machinaga’s yakuza status meant he had committed fraud, according to local media.

It was unclear at the time of writing, however, if Machinaga had been formally charged.

He is reportedly one of the bosses of Tsukasa Kogyo, which is an organisation affiliated with the Aichi Prefecture’s arm of the Sixth Yamaguchi-gumi.

The clan is named after its founder Harukichi Yamaguchi and it finds its origins with Kobe dockworkers before World War II.

The Yamaguchi-gumi are among the world’s richest mobsters and the organisation is considered to be the most powerful of its kind in Japan.

They reportedly make billions of dollars a year from gambling, racketeering, bringing in billions of dollars a year from extortion, gambling, the sex industry and online pornography, weapons and drug trafficking, and property and construction kickbacks, as well as manipulating the stock market.

The yakuza are members of transnational organised crime syndicates and are often akin to gangsters or members of western-style mafias.