By SHIMPACHI YOSHIDA/ Senior Staff Writer
February 3, 2023 at 15:25 JST
A police officer in Tokyo hands out a flier with instructions on how to avoid becoming a victim of a scam. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Telephone scams targeting mainly the elderly to get victims to transfer funds from ATMs to false bank accounts are on the rise again, according to the National Police Agency.
It estimated that 36.14 billion yen ($281 million) was bilked from unwary people in 2022, up 28.2 percent over the previous year, for the first increase in eight years.
The number of individual cases totaled 17,520, up 20.8 percent. It was the second straight year for the number of cases to rise.
Police admit it is difficult to eradicate phone scams because they rarely get their hands on the perpetrators.
In fiscal 2021, police said 2,469 individuals were arrested or had their cases referred to prosecutors in connection with telephone scams, but only 48, or 1.9 percent of the total, were considered to be leaders of criminal groups.
The bulk of those arrested were caught in the act of receiving money from victims or withdrawing funds at automatic teller machines using bank cards obtained fraudulently.
There was a noticeable drop in such cases in 2020 and 2021 due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
But one scam in which the amount pilfered in 2022 exceeded pre-COVID-19 levels involved falsely informing victims they had refunds of medical expenses or other payments coming their way if they simply followed instructions at ATMs. Those instructions led the victims to transfer money that they are unlikely to see again.
A total of 5.37 billion yen was netted in such scams in 2022, an increase of 18.9 percent over the previous year.
The traditional method of posing as a child or relative in desperate need of money also pulled in a total of 12.71 billion yen in 2022, an increase of 40.3 percent over 2021.
Yuki Watanabe, who police are seeking to deport from the Philippines in connection with a string of violent robberies in Japan, is also suspected of masterminding a series of crimes in which individuals posing as police officers inform victims their bank cards have been used inappropriately and switch the cards for fake ones at the victim’s home. The genuine bank cards are then used to empty the person’s bank account.
In 2022, a total of 4.33 billion yen was stolen this way.
Police believe Watanabe’s group netted about 6 billion yen through this method between November 2018 and June 2020.
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