The scam for grandparents now takes a third of its victims from people in their twenties and thirties

Why this case matters

オレオレ詐欺 — “it’s me” fraud — is named for what the caller says. It’s me. Mum, it’s me. It has been Japan’s signature scam for two decades, and everything about the country’s response was built around one assumption: that the victim is old.

In the first half of 2025 that assumption broke.

Ore-ore cases among people in their twenties rose 1,015.9%. Among people in their thirties, 918.6%. Together those two age bands were 30.3% of all ore-ore victims, up from 8.3% a year earlier.

The numbers

Ore-ore fraud in the first half of 2025: 6,278 cases, up 193.4%. Losses ¥45.30 billion, up 326.4%.

By age band:

Age	Cases	Change
80+	1,454	+32.4%
30s	988	+918.6%
70s	925	+87.6%
20s	915	+1,015.9%

People over 80 are still the largest single group. But three of the four largest groups are now separated by fewer than 550 cases, and two of them are under forty.

Why the elderly share fell without elderly victimisation falling

This is the part that is easy to report wrongly.

The proportion of Japanese special-fraud victims aged 65 or over fell 17.8 percentage points, to 52.9%. That reads like a success story about protecting older people.

It is not. The number of elderly victims rose — 6,978 cases, up 10.4%. The share fell because the denominator exploded: total special fraud cases rose 47.5% in a year, driven by ore-ore and fictitious billing spreading into younger age groups.

The NPA says this directly: the spread of these two fraud types into people in their twenties and thirties is the main reason the elderly share of the total has declined.

And where that spread has not happened, the old pattern holds exactly. For fraud types other than ore-ore and fictitious billing, elderly victims were still 78.4% of cases — and those case counts fell 7.2%.

What changed

The driver is documented and it is not a change in who is vulnerable. It is a change in the pretext.

Ore-ore fraud in 2025 is mostly fake police fraud: 4,601 of the 6,278 first-half cases, or 73.3%. A call claiming to be your son works on a parent. A call claiming to be a police officer investigating you works on anybody with a bank account.

The category is still named for the grandson pretext. What is inside it is no longer mainly that.

What it means for a reader

Two things, and the second is the one that gets missed.

Japanese fraud prevention has spent twenty years teaching one lesson to one audience — older people, warned about a call from a grandchild in trouble. That work is not wasted; the fraud types it addressed are the ones still falling.

But the current growth is aimed at people who have never been the target of any of it, who assume this is a scam that happens to their grandparents, and who are consequently the least prepared audience in the country.