Why Does Fraud Keep Rising Instead of Falling?

I wrote earlier about telephone fraud by people posing as police officers. The thing that nagged at me the whole time I was writing it was this: with all the warnings being issued, why isn't the damage going down?

I looked into it. It isn't a matter of it failing to go down.

According to the National Police Agency's confirmed figures, the total taken by special fraud in 2025 was 142.31 billion yen. The year before it was 71.88 billion, so it roughly doubled in a single year. The number of recognised cases was 27,832, also the worst on record. Converted to a daily figure, 390 million yen is vanishing somewhere every single day.

And the main driver of the increase, named as such by the National Police Agency itself, is what they now call fake-police fraud. The method I wrote about last time.

On top of that, counted separately, there is investment fraud and romance fraud conducted through social media, and the losses there come to 183.43 billion yen. Together the total passes 300 billion. This is not a discussion of a national budget. It is the amount fraudsters carried off in one year.

How did it come to this? I think there are three main reasons.

The first is that the target changed.

Broken down by age, the largest number of recognised fake-police fraud cases is among people in their thirties, at 2,239, followed by people in their twenties, at 1,718. In terms of case numbers, the young are out in front.

That is a major shift. Until now, special fraud was a crime aimed at the elderly. So the countermeasures, the public warnings, the vigilance at bank counters were all built for the elderly. And into that came the working-age generation, who had assumed none of it concerned them, arriving wholesale as targets. It is like water flowing into the place where no seawall was built.

The picture changes, though, if you look at the amounts. The largest losses by value are among people in their seventies, at 27.4 billion yen, followed by people in their sixties at 25.6 billion. The young lead on cases, the old lead on money. Which means both generations are being stripped, each in a different way. This is not a problem belonging to one of them.

The second is that the method of extraction changed.

The average loss per completed case is 5.236 million yen, up from 3.503 million the year before, a jump of more than 1.7 million. Each individual case has become larger.

The reason is plain. In fake-police fraud, the pretext is that your entire assets must be examined in order to keep you from being arrested, and everything gets sent across. This is not designed to take a few hundred thousand yen. It is designed to go after everything a person has.

And the means of transfer has moved to online banking and cryptocurrency.

This is the part that really hurts, because the most effective element in Japan's defence against special fraud has not, in fact, been any system or law. It has been people. The bank clerk at the counter who asks what the money is for. The convenience store employee who stops a customer buying a pile of electronic gift cards and says, isn't that a scam? A considerable number of cases have been halted right there, at the water's edge.

A transfer that completes entirely inside a screen has no such person in it. Nobody speaks up. The place where it could be stopped is gone.

The third is that the bases are overseas, and that AI has erased the language barrier.

Of the phone numbers used in these crimes, a full 75.5 percent are international numbers. Three out of four come from abroad. Naturally, enforcement struggles to reach them.

And into that came generative AI. The National Police Agency's assessment is that the methods have grown more sophisticated by having AI produce video and text and handle automated voice response, crossing barriers of language and region.

In the previous article I wrote about the calls that ring you out of nowhere and speak in a machine voice. That is precisely this. There was a time when you had to assemble people who could speak Japanese in order to defraud Japanese people. Not any more. It can be tried tens of thousands of times, with almost no manpower.

There is a figure that proves it. The number of precursor calls, the ones identified as suspected fraud, came to 331,653 in 2025, up more than seventy percent on the year before. More than ten times the number of actual completed cases are being placed and coming up empty. The net has not got bigger. The number of times the net is thrown has increased by an order of magnitude.

So has Japan become a target for fraudsters?

Half of it, I think, is yes. A society with large household financial assets, a strong attachment to cash, and high trust in the police and public offices is an efficient market for fraud that impersonates authority. The Japanese quality of being conscientious and of doing what public institutions say is being used, directly, as the weak point.

That said, damage with the same structure is occurring in every country, and it is not a Japanese phenomenon. A fraud industry, automated with AI and operating across borders, has been assembled, and from where it sits Japan is one of the markets that pays. That is the more accurate way to put it.

Lining up the numbers is enough to make anyone feel hopeless.

But there is something I do not want people to forget. That 300 billion yen is built out of individual telephone calls, one at a time. And each individual call stops when you hang up.

The doubled losses, the 75 percent international numbers, the AI automation, none of it means anything the moment you put the receiver down. However large the machinery on the other side, the final step is whether you send the money with your own hands. That part, at least, is still on our side.

Don't answer unknown numbers. If you answer, hang up. Tell somebody.

What you have to do has not changed at all.

One last thing, about why I write this sort of thing.

It is not out of a sense of justice. Nothing that lofty.

If writing it means one fewer person is victimised, that is one step closer to a world that is as it ought to be. That is all there is to it. Money earned by honest work and saved honestly, disappearing on a single phone call. A state of affairs in which that has become ordinary is, by any measure, the thing that is wrong.

In short, I suppose I simply dislike seeing honest people taken for fools.