Photo/Illutration The actual number for the Aichi prefectural police headquarters is displayed. (Provided by National Police Agency)

Scammers based abroad who pose as law enforcement officers are displaying genuine phone numbers of police stations in Japan when calling potential victims.

The practice, apparently using apps that can falsify the caller’s phone number displayed on the recipient’s smartphone, has sharply increased in recent months.

In many of the scams, fake police officers inform the recipients of the calls that they are suspects in a crime and ask them to transfer money as part of an investigation into their assets.

“We never use the phone to inform individuals they are the subject of an investigation,” an official with the National Police Agency said.

According to the NPA, between January 2024 and noon on March 18 this year, there were 848 scam phone calls displaying the actual number of a police station.

Almost 90 percent of those calls, or 788, displayed the number for the Shinjuku Police Station of Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department. The calls were made to individuals in 31 prefectures.

Twenty-nine scam calls displayed the number for the Chuo Police Station of the MPD.

During the same time frame, there were 610 cases of phone calls being made from the number of a prefectural police headquarters.

Although the MPD number was used most frequently, scammers also displayed the numbers of 44 other prefectural police headquarters.

According to an MPD official, apps available abroad allow users to fake their displayed phone numbers when placing a call.

The NPA will ask the communications ministry and telecommunications companies to take action to deal with the problem.

There has also been a rapid increase in scams displaying “0110” as the last four digits of the caller. Those digits are frequently used by actual police stations around Japan.

In the first two months of this year, 3,416 scam cases used such numbers, compared with only a few cases each month in the first quarter of 2024.

The numbers began increasing in April 2024 and rapidly shot up this year.

In 1,039 confirmed scam cases in January and February this year, the perpetrator posed as a police officer or used the numbers of police stations. Victims in these cases were swindled out of 10.6 billion yen ($71 million) in total.

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