No BBC shares to be found here

A couple in southern Japan have been arrested after making half a million pounds by selling fake shares in the BBC, reports say.

According to the Sankei Shimbun, one of Japan's main national daily newspapers, the two - Hadoko Shoji and his wife Kimiko - have conned some 25 people since August 2002, netting about 100m yen (�530,000; $860,000).

But the pair were rumbled when one of their early victims went to the police.

The woman had taken the couple at their word when they promised - in October last year - that the "shares from England" would double in less than six months.

Once that period had passed with no sign of any return on her 570,000-yen investment, she went to the police in her home town of Takamatsu and the two fraudsters were taken into custody.

Takamatsu is on the smallest of Japan's four main islands, although thousands more tiny islets litter the country's coastline.

Brand new

The island, Shikoku, is traditionally seen as one of the more rural - even slightly backward, so the stereotype goes - parts of Japan.

Even so, the experience of more than a decade of economic stagnation has taught the Japanese to be more careful than perhaps they were during the boom years of the 1980s, said Seijiro Takeshita, senior strategist at Mizuho Bank in London.

"People are a little more cautious these days, not least because of the upsurge in cults and other groups like the new Aum [an offshoot of the cult which put lethal Sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in March 1995]," he told BBC News Online.

"They understand when something seems just too good to be true."

Public service

But set against the intense brand awareness of the Japanese, that caution may count for little.

"We're all human, and the BBC has very strong brand recognition in Japan," he said.

"The BBC's not even listed of course, so it should have been easy to disprove.

"But it does depict the amazing belief in brands in Japan," he said.

The BBC is a public service broadcaster, which is funded by a licence fee.

The BBC World Service is funded directly by the Foreign Office, but is editorially independent.

Neither is listed on the stock exchange.