The number of investment scams perpetrated via social media has been rising sharply in Japan since July 2023 amid growing public interest in stock trading on the back of advances in the Japanese market, police data showed Thursday.
The number of such scams conducted monthly using Facebook, Instagram and other social media jumped from 204 last July to 369 in December, the National Police Agency said. The rise in the previous six months was from 85 to 120.
Damage amounted to some 27.79 billion yen ($187 million), with many scams involving victims making multiple transfers to accounts in a short period of time. The biggest loss in a case was 340 million yen.
The rise in investment scams comes as the Japanese government encourages a shift from savings to investments in the equities market, revamping its NISA tax-free investment program in January.
A senior agency official said more opportunities for online investing were another factor behind the sharp rise in scams.
The agency, meanwhile, also said online romance scams in which criminals adopt fake identities to pose as romantic partners to swindle money increased throughout 2023, with such cases nearly doubling to 170 in December from 88 in January.
Damage from romance scams totaled some 17.73 billion yen, the agency said.
Together with investment scams using social media, the amount of damage reached around 45.52 billion yen in 2023, surpassing that caused by telecommunications fraud including phone scams and cyber fraud by 1.4 billion yen, the agency said.
Among the victims of the romance scams, 72.4 percent were induced to invest in order to continue the relationship, the agency said.
Over half of the victims of both romance scams and investment scams via social media were either men in their 50s to 60s or women in their 40s to 50s, it said.
In most cases, scammers first make contact with the victims mainly through Facebook, Instagram and matching apps, with around 90 percent of the cases then moving to exchanging massages through the Line app, the agency said.
The agency has notified prefectural police across the country to strengthen countermeasures and promote sharing of information.
It is the first time that the agency has released the number of investment scams using social media and of online romance scams.
Suspecting that crime groups based overseas are involved in the crimes, the agency intends to strengthen coordination internationally, officials said.
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