Receive free Japanese society updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Japanese society news every morning.
Sitting on that odd, fading and often slightly guilt-inducing list of things that were better during the pandemic was the sharp Covid-driven retreat of Japan’s defrauding of the elderly.
But now the alarmingly swift resurrection of what is known as the ore ore scam is goading the country towards an ageist, philosophically complicated and not terribly practical solution. If it isn’t careful, the world’s oldest population could decide to declare its elderly incompetent.
Ore ore fraud has always been an emotional subject. Con artists pillage Japan’s senior citizens by posing on the phone as a young relative in trouble with an urgent need (car accident, medical bill, etc) for an immediate cash transfer at an ATM.
The scam’s success, and the reason it evokes the spectre of deep societal failure, is not just the cruel victimisation of the vulnerable. The hand-wringing arises from a recognition that, after years of family atomisation, urban migration and physical estrangement, many elderly Japanese do not recognise their grandchildren’s voices well enough to question a call that begins “Hi Granny, it’s me!”
At its pre-Covid peak, ore ore was netting crooks roughly $140mn a year. That plunged by two-thirds in 2020 when unofficial lockdowns kept the elderly away from everything, including cash machines. Last year, the scam was back to 60 per cent of its former rapacity, and in the first six months of 2023 continued to rise briskly.
Into this situation has arrived Japan’s National Police Agency, which announced last month that it would launch a new unit to crack down on scams targeting the elderly. Two weeks later, Japanese media reported that the NPA was proposing (and had discussed with banking industry groups) a plan that would, at a national level, lock anyone over 65 who had not performed a cash transfer for a year or more out of all ATMs. There would be mitigation and workarounds, but the general idea seemed to be a grand ringfencing of the elderly from their own gullibility.
The proposal represented an attempt to expand to the whole country a version of protections already in place at several regional banks, including Yokohama and Yamagata. Some of these impose financial limits on transfers and cash withdrawals, while others require users to produce ID. But the consistent logic is that people over 70 need more restrictions on their activity than the rest of the population.
However good the intention, and however keen the police may be to reduce a particularly pernicious type of crime, this strays into dangerous territory. Blocking services to a specific group of people (what if the ATMs were locked by geography, gender or race?), with the implication that membership of that group alone places their competence in question, is always going to be problematic.
But particularly so for this cohort in Japan, where, for reference, nearly 13mn people over 70 hold a driving licence. This is a country where 29 per cent of the population is now over 65 and the combination of age and labour shortages is fundamentally reshaping society. Not a great time, in other words, for either the police or the banks — if only by implication — to cast age as any kind of disqualification.
It also jars because this is a country that strongly asserts and depends upon the competence of the over-70s in many, many areas of public and private life. A government survey in 2022 found that 27 per cent of presidents of small and medium-sized businesses — a sector that employs more than two-thirds of the Japanese workforce — were over 70. Across all companies, according to a separate survey by the research firm Teikoku Databank, a quarter are led by the over-70s.
Health ministry data, meanwhile, shows that just under 34,000 of the country’s doctors are over 70. In politics, that age bracket represents, respectively, 8.6 per cent and 7.3 per cent of the lower and upper houses of parliament. They contribute 36 per cent of town-level politicians, and 12 per cent of those in prefectural-level assemblies. Basic pension age is 65.
The central problem with the NPA’s proposal is not its flawed legitimacy or the potentially huge pushback it would provoke if it actually got off the drawing board. The issue is the vast disjoint it reveals between policy thinking and the evolving realities of ageing, shrinking and labour-starved Japan.
It is easier said than done, of course, but Japan has no choice but to embrace the facts of its demographics. Many of the adjustments will be extremely painful, and could significantly dent Japan’s sense of what it can and cannot do as a nation. ATM locks are an attempt to push those realities away, rather than confronting them.
