Allied LLC, an Osaka-based asset manager, is under investigation on suspicion it bilked Japanese investors, mostly housewives, using a currency trading fund, a police official said.

Investigators said a woman they declined to name who ran Allied seminars has disappeared after getting 300 people to invest 2.4 billion yen ($26.57 million) in the fund. The company stopped paying dividends in November last year.

“Allied was raided on Jan. 15 on suspicion of running a business without a license in violation of the Financial Products Trading Law,” said Kiyotaka Kawamura, a police investigator in Kochi prefecture, on the western island of Shikoku. The police confiscated computers and documents. No arrests have been made, he said. Allied’s phone number was disconnected when called by Bloomberg News.

Officials handling complaints from investors say Allied, which promised risk-free returns of as much as 5 percent a month, may have …