Man Arrested For Buying Lunch With Blood-Stained Money

Staff at a beef bowl restaurant in Japan are presumably pretty relieved this week, because police have finally caught and arrested the customer who kept buying beef bowls with blood-stained bills.

According to Rocket News 24, the bloody 1,000-yen, or $8, bills started showing up in March at a branch of the Nakau beef bowl chain in Shizuoka City. The restaurant uses an automatic payment system where customers order and pay for their meals at a machine in the front of the restaurant and are given a slip that lets them collect their food. But at this Nakau branch, employees started to notice that every once in a while they would find the inside of the machine was dirty with dried blood and there was a 1,000-yen bill in the machine covered in blood.

That would be weird anywhere, but according to Rocket News 24, it is unusual in Japan to find a bill that is even wrinkled, let alone sticky with wet blood.

Finally, though, restaurant employees spotted a customer feeding a wet, bloody bill into the vending machine and called the police. When questioned, the 42-year-old admitted that yes, he had been feeding wet, sticky, blood-covered bills into the restaurant vending machine on several occasions.

It is still unclear why exactly he was doing that, but the man reportedly works in the nursing field and is therefore in contact with human blood on occasion. That still does not explain why there would be blood on his money, though. The man has since been arrested and charged with obstruction of business operations. There's probably some kind of health code violation in there, too.