Japan acts to stamp out insurance-for-murder

TOKYO - Japanese authorities plan to take action after reports ofso-called insurance-for-murder rackets. The Financial SupervisoryAgency intends to ensure life insurance firms check policies morecarefully and it has also proposed a lowering of the threshold abovewhich policies must be registered on a central database. Its movecomes on the back of reports in Japanese newspapers of people fakingmarriages, taking out a number of insurance policies, then murderingthe insured. Because the size of the policies was below theregistration threshold, they went unnoticed.