Japanese police officer pens stories to expose reality of scams

TOKYO – 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 in 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. He ends up losing his savings and 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 (S$624.3 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 alone, 6.6 billion yen was stolen, despite efforts by the police to raise awareness by handing out fliers 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 methods in which scams are perpetrated.

A 39-year-old officer called “K”, an avid reader, was chosen to write the stories, although the officer has no professional writing experience.

K remembers seeing an elderly woman who apologised 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. KYODO NEWS