Japan police officer pens stories to expose reality of fraud

Kyodo News

5 days ago

YOKOHAMA - A Japanese prefectural police force is releasing works of short fiction penned by an officer to inform the public about the techniques used in fraud and the realities victims face amid an increase of such crimes.
"Officer K's Fraud Files" released online by the Kanagawa prefectural police includes a story of a retired man who falls victim to an investment scam perpetrated via a matching app, ending up losing his savings as well as distancing himself from his family.
The initiative comes amid a rise in so-called "special fraud" cases in Japan. A record-high 71.8 billion yen ($485 million) was stolen in some 21,000 cases detected in 2024 involving scammers posing as police investigators or relatives, among others, according to the National Police Agency.
In Kanagawa Prefecture alone, 6.6 billion yen was stolen, despite efforts by the police to raise awareness by handing out flyers and giving crime prevention lectures.
The prefectural police released the first story in June with officials in the crime prevention team hoping such an approach would be a more effective way of showing the ways scams are perpetrated.
A 39-year-old officer called "K," an avid reader, was chosen to write the stories, although the officer had no professional writing experience.
K remembers seeing an elderly woman who apologized repeatedly after she was blamed by her family for being swindled out of millions of yen, the official said.
The second story, released in late July, portrays a university student who turns himself in to police after taking on "dark part-time work," accepting jobs from a remote figure who orders him to be an accomplice in increasingly serious crimes.
"Fraudsters are very clever in their methods," K said. "People may think 'Why did they fall for it?' but I want people to think of these stories as something that could happen to them."