Hundreds upon hundreds of American athletes, including the likes of Kevin Garnett and Tim Duncan have been swindled out of money, so it’s not like this isn’t something that couldn’t have happened to him.
The reason that Ippei even had the access he did was because in the end, he was more like Ohtani’s personal assistant, to the point where Ippei is on record saying he spends more time with Ohtani than he does with his wife. Ippei was the one who actually set up Ohtani’s “MLB account” (the bank account that the Angels and now the Dodgers deposit his salary into), and had the login info.
That account hadn’t been touched from when it was set up in 2018 to when Ippei started illegally gambling in December 2021, and all of the IP addresses the logins came from were from devices logged to Ippei. Ippei would frequently pretend to be Ohtani to the bank to get money to gamble, and was the only person in Ohtani’s circle other than Ohtani that understood Japanese, hence why he was able to keep Ohtani’s financial advisors (Ohtani’s endorsement money goes to accounts supervised by them) away from the MLB account, because he told them that Ohtani wanted that account private.
Hundreds upon hundreds of American athletes, including the likes of Kevin Garnett and Tim Duncan have been swindled out of money, so it’s not like this isn’t something that couldn’t have happened to him.
The reason that Ippei even had the access he did was because in the end, he was more like Ohtani’s personal assistant, to the point where Ippei is on record saying he spends more time with Ohtani than he does with his wife. Ippei was the one who actually set up Ohtani’s “MLB account” (the bank account that the Angels and now the Dodgers deposit his salary into), and had the login info.
That account hadn’t been touched from when it was set up in 2018 to when Ippei started illegally gambling in December 2021, and all of the IP addresses the logins came from were from devices logged to Ippei. Ippei would frequently pretend to be Ohtani to the bank to get money to gamble, and was the only person in Ohtani’s circle other than Ohtani that understood Japanese, hence why he was able to keep Ohtani’s financial advisors (Ohtani’s endorsement money goes to accounts supervised by them) away from the MLB account, because he told them that Ohtani wanted that account private.