In the past few years, elderly Japanese living on their own have become easy targets for scammers. It is generally believed that older retired Japanese have accumulated a great amount of wealth, and tend to keep their savings at home due to the country’s negative interest on excess reserves. That generation, baby boomers born shortly after World War II, have experienced Japan’s most flourishing, thriving economic growth. On the other hand, those from Japan’s “lost decades” spanning from the 1990s to the 2010s are not necessarily well-off.
As a result, Japan’s baby boomers have become targets of fraud rings. When seniors living alone receive scam telephone calls, such as from someone claiming they are with the police, they are unaware they are being targeted and tend to fall for the scams. That is due to their isolated lifestyles, which prevent them from getting in touch with others for help. The callers often tell the seniors that they have been flagged as being involved in money laundering, and so their accounts must be monitored, or that their nieces or nephews urgently need their financial support after some kind of emergency.
Some elderly people believe what the callers say, and worse, allow the scammers who pretend to be police or government officials to take over their credit card and bank accounts. Sometimes, scammers even pretend to be prosecutors who must take the older person’s bank books from them. This has become the most common scheme employed by Japanese fraud rings.
The Japanese government has implemented a range of measures to combat such crimes, but the schemes have been evolving, with criminals adopting ever more complicated and sophisticated methods. The number of cases reported and the money lost to fraud rings remains high.
To protect older Japanese, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corp developed a technique combining traditional telephone answering machines with artificial intelligence (AI). The terminal is able to transmit calls to an online platform, where AI software would analyze the content of the calls and determine whether it is fraudulent. If the software identifies a caller as a scammer, the telecom can inform the elderly person’s relatives or friends (who are listed as contacts with the company). The purpose is to lower the risk of being scammed.
This technique cannot be applied to mobile phones, but for older people who often stay at home and hence are easy targets for scammers, this could do the work. Taiwan has become an aging society as well. Taiwanese telecoms should develop similar techniques, so that elderly Taiwanese can be protected.
Lin Shu-li is a doctoral student at Central Police University.
Translated by Emma Liu
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