The idea of the Toke Match site, a service based in Osaka, Japan, was to offer owners of luxury watches the opportunity to receive monthly commissions by lending their goods which were rented to individuals.
But at the end of January, the company Neo Reverse, manager of this service, announced that it was pulling the curtain by promising to return the watches.
The problem is that 900 luxury watches worth nearly 12 million euros and belonging to around 190 people have disappeared, according to the daily Asahi and other local media this Thursday.
On auction or second-hand sales sites
However, some of the watches were spotted on an online auction site, prompting the owners to file dozens of complaints with Japanese police.
The operator of this site admitted to having seen at least 20 watches passing by bearing serial numbers corresponding to those loaned to Toke Match.
“We immediately stopped the circulation of these watches,” assured a spokesperson last week.
The Japan Sharing Economy Association said in a statement that it had received reports that some of the watches were also circulating in second-hand stores.
The size of the Japanese sharing economy market is growing rapidly, reaching 16 billion euros in the last fiscal year, according to the association.
Neo Reverse was one of around 400 members of the association, but was excluded on February 1 following complaints from owners of missing watches.
Tokyo police this week obtained an arrest warrant for Takazumi Kominato, 42, the owner of Toke Match, and placed him on a wanted list.
However, he reportedly left Japan at the end of February for Dubai.
The police are considering putting him on the international wanted list.