A Police Officer Will Never Phone You to Say "You're the Suspect, Aren't You

Far from going down, the number of fraud victims here in Akita Prefecture is going up again.

A man in his thirties in Akita City was cheated out of 7.1 million yen in cash after a phone call from a man claiming to be a police officer. The opening line, reportedly, was: your account is suspected of having been used by a criminal group for money laundering.

In his thirties. Please don't skip past that. This kind of fraud is widely assumed to catch old people, but if you line up the victims reported here in Akita, they are in their twenties, thirties, forties, sixties, seventies and eighties. Age has nothing to do with it. The only thing that has anything to do with it is whether, in the moment that call came in, the person had time to think.

The method is, in truth, simple.

First the phone rings. Lately it is often an unfamiliar number beginning with a plus sign. It is made to look as though it originates overseas, so the source is hard to trace.

The caller claims to be a police officer. He gives a division and a name. He is confident, and his tone is calm. This is where most people believe him.

Then comes the line: an account in your name has been used in a crime, you may become a suspect. You know nothing about it, so you are thrown. From the instant you are thrown, the initiative belongs to him.

Next, the conversation gets moved. You are steered off the phone and onto a messaging app or a video call. There, something resembling a police ID, or a document resembling an arrest warrant, is shown on the screen. They are fakes, of course, but a person who is already shaken cannot tell. And once the conversation has moved into an app, neither the call record nor the caller's number is likely to remain.

And then, without fail, you are told this: it is a matter of investigative secrecy, so do not speak of it to your family or to anyone else.

That is the central trick. The real reason is that the lie collapses if you talk to anyone, but the person hearing it takes it to mean that he has been caught up in a serious investigation. He cuts himself off from the very people he could consult.

Finally it turns to money. Your assets must be verified in order to prove your innocence, transfer them temporarily to the account we specify, you will get it all back afterwards. By that point, you will not be allowed to hang up until you have sent it.

Why do people fall for it?

Fear, time pressure, authority and isolation. All four are applied at once.

A frightened human being stops thinking clearly. On top of that he is hurried along with "right now," the other party carries the title of the police, and he is told to consult nobody. Every condition required for calm thought has been removed, without exception.

So this is not a question of intelligence. It is an attack designed to target a weakness in human psychology, and given the right conditions anyone will fall for it. The people most at risk are the ones certain it could never be them.

There is, however, a way to see through it. And you only need to remember one thing.

If you really were the criminal, the police would not phone you.

Think about it and it is obvious. Would the side conducting an investigation deliberately ring up a suspect to say "you're the suspect, aren't you"? He would run. He would destroy the evidence. No investigation works that way. If you genuinely were under suspicion, it would arrive in the form of police officers turning up at your house in numbers, one day, without warning.

And one more thing. A police officer will never tell you over the phone to move money in your account. Never to go to an ATM. Never to buy cryptocurrency. The moment that sentence appears, whatever the person is calling himself, it is fraud.

And this is worth holding on to. Even if a genuine police officer said such a thing to you, it would not be an act of justice. It would be a crime committed under cover of office. Which means that whether the caller is fake or real, there is no reason on earth to comply. You do not even need to work out which one he is.

So what should you do?

Don't answer. That is the most reliable option. You are under no obligation to pick up an unknown number, especially one beginning with a plus sign. Anyone with legitimate business will reach you another way.

If you have answered, hang up. You do not have to hear the whole thing out. Don't feel it would be rude. The person is a fraudster.

If you want to check, never call back the number you were given. Call the police station on a number you looked up yourself. That single extra step is enough to make this fraud almost impossible to run.

And tell somebody. Your family, anyone. If you were told to tell nobody, then all the more reason to tell someone. The instruction to tell nobody is itself the proof of fraud.

There is one thing worth memorising before you ever need to look it up.

Police Consultation Line #9110

It is the number for when you want to consult the police about something that is not an emergency. Telling somebody to go and look up a number in the middle of a panic is asking too much, so this one is worth putting in your head in advance.

And one more thing, increasingly common lately: the automated call.

It rings you out of nowhere, a machine voice talks about unpaid charges or account verification, and it tries to get you to press a number. This too should be ignored, or cut off immediately.

The automated voice has two purposes. One is psychological, in that a machine voice sounds more like an official institution. The other is the nasty one. The moment you follow the prompt and press a number, the other side learns that this number is live and that a human being who responds is on the end of it. From there you are either put through to an actual fraudster, or another call arrives on another day. The act of pressing is itself handing over your information.

Besides which, calling somebody out of the blue and then having a machine do the talking is nothing but rude. Would anybody with genuine business make a call that way?

I want to flag that there are people out there collecting personal information in exactly this fashion.

One last thing.

Being deceived is nothing to be ashamed of.

Many of the people who have been victimised say they were too ashamed to tell anyone. That silence produces the next victim. The blame is one hundred percent on the fraudster's side, never on the person who was deceived.

If you have been caught, contact the police and the financial institution you transferred to, immediately. Caught early enough, it can sometimes be stopped. Time spent being ashamed is the greatest waste of all.

And please, tell somebody about this. A parent, a child, the person next door. Fraud hates it when people talk to one another. Which is why talking is, in itself, the countermeasure.