TOKYO: Amid a surge in social media fraud cases in which Japanese celebrities’ photographs are used without permission in fake advertisements to lure victims into making investments, those who have been impersonated in such ads have started to take preventative action.

They are appearing on related police awareness videos and posting alert messages on their own social media accounts.

According to the National Police Agency, the amount of money stolen in investment fraud through social media in Japan in January-June rocketed about seven times from a year earlier to 50.6 billion yen. In half of such fraud cases, perpetrators asked for investments by pretending to be celebrities or famous investors.

“I’m angry! I never advertise investment products!” popular commentator and journalist Akira Ikegami said in an awareness video created by the Aichi prefectural police department in central Japan. At an event to mark the completion of the video, he noted: “There are people who fell for scams because they trusted me. I felt distressed to know that.”

Around last autumn, Ikegami learned that there were scam ads employing his photos. At that time, however, he did not take the situation seriously.

Alarmed when such ads did not decrease after the turn of the year, he said, “I can’t just ignore them.”

In May this year, Ikegami received an offer from Aichi police to appear on the warning video, which he accepted. It was the second time for him to help create a police video, after working with the Nagano prefectural police. “I want people to be skeptical about any moneymaking proposals,” he said.

The video by Aichi police was shown in more than 100 places in the prefecture, including on a centerfield screen at a domed stadium in the prefectural capital city of Nagoya and large video screens around Nagoya Station.

Photos of the face of famous entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa were misused in online ads, which falsely said that he held a free investment class. The entrepreneur posted on his account on X, formerly Twitter, in March, “It is a serious situation” that there has been damage caused by such fraud, and criticized Meta Platforms Inc., previously called Facebook Inc., for failing to delete the ads in question. In May, he filed a lawsuit against Meta seeking an injunction against the ads.

Another noted entrepreneur, Takafumi Horie, released on his official YouTube channel last year an alert video over fake ads. Hiroyuki Kishi, former industry ministry official and professor of Keio University Graduate School of Media Design called via X for caution against fake accounts employing photos of him.

Ikegami said many celebrities used in scams are those who talk about the economy, adding, “I want to continue to make efforts to prevent fraud.”

JIJI Press