GASA survey finds only 18% of scammed Japanese adults report to police

According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, a new study of 1,200 Japanese adults has measured a gap that usually stays invisible: the distance between how many people are scammed and how many ever tell the police. The study finds that 22% of participants encountered a scam in the past year, and among those, 53% went on to interact with the scammer.

The Global Anti-Scam Alliance carried out the survey to put numbers on something normally guessed at. It found that 1% of participants experienced financial or data loss, and that among those who were scammed, only 18% reported the incident to the police.

What the numbers show

Confidence does not predict caution. 57% of respondents say they are confident in recognizing scams, yet more than half of those who were exposed still interacted with the scammer. Recognizing a scam in the abstract and disengaging from one in the moment are different skills, and this study is one of the first to separate them in a single sample.

The reporting figure is the number that changes what happens next. If only 18% of victims tell the police, the other 82% never become part of any official count. That means the true scale of financial and data loss in Japan is understated everywhere it is measured through police or regulator statistics alone. A survey like this one, going directly to the public rather than to case files, is the only way to see the missing 82%.

Why it matters

The mental wellbeing figure gives the reporting gap its weight. 55% of victims say the scam affected their mental wellbeing. Most of them did not report what happened. That combination, harm without a record, is exactly what an underreporting gap looks like in practice, and it is why bodies like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance run these studies rather than relying on police data alone.

For anyone in Japan who has been scammed and did not report it, this study is a reminder that the incident still matters as data, even after the fact. Reporting after the event still feeds the count that regulators and researchers use to size the problem and argue for resources. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance's work depends on people being willing to say what happened, whether to the police or in a survey like this one.