Lawyers increasingly in the front lines of fraud suppression

Who can you trust these days? No one. Yet we are more trusting than ever. Trust breeds fraud. Fraud breeds more fraud. From primary fraud springs secondary fraud. Spa (Aug 13-20) introduces in that connection “Ms S.” An online investor, she was bilked, she says, of 20 million yen. What to do? Find a lawyer. Where? Online. She found one. It was late at night but his answer came promptly. Yes, he said, that was his field, he could help. Upon receipt of a retainer fee of 370,000 yen he would set immediately to work.

The fee duly remitted, Ms S waited. And waited. Her heart sank.

What next? Another lawyer? What else? The second lawyer, it is pleasant to report, is – seems, anyway – honest. The investigation proceeds.

All too typical, says Spa. Consumer centers across the country estimate a 3-fold rise within three years of complaints of fraud perpetrated by the very people supposedly in the front lines of fraud suppression: lawyers. Sometimes the “lawyer” is no lawyer at all.

Fresh in our memory still is the case of former LDP Lower House member Tomohiro Konno, arrested in June along with 10 others. Konno himself is a qualified lawyer. Not so those to whom he allegedly sold the use of his name, giving them in effect the right to call themselves lawyers from Konno’s office. Together they are alleged to have defrauded 900 victims of 500 million yen.

It’s a rich harvest, for those willing to do the dirty work and brave the risks. Investment fraud and romance fraud in particular spawn victims who, desperate like Ms. S for help, clutch at the first straw that offers it.

“Seventy percent of the people who consult us,” says Kazuhide Saijo of the support group Toshi Sagi Higaisha no Kai (Investment Fraud Victims Association), “are victims of secondary fraud.” “Once bitten twice shy” is a proverb with 2000 years of history behind it but the speed, intensity and anonymity of life online seems to overwhelm the wisdom it expresses. “Many victims,” says Saijo, “don’t know who defrauded them. The people they were dealing with are anonymous internet criminals. And the money extorted circulates so rapidly that even if you win in court, in the overwhelming majority of cases, there’s no getting your money back.”

You’d think everyone would know this by now. It’s common knowledge, common sense. But common sense withers in internet soil, so prolific of everything else. The very ease of transactions – one click and its yours! – the very thing, in short, that should signal danger, evidently does the opposite. Stunned from the blow you’ve received, you go trolling for help – and there it is! “Open 365 days a year 24 hours a day, offering free consultation, offering hope of getting your money back – here’s someone to turn to,” says Saijo. Click.

There remains this question: why do lawyers turn rogue? Most don’t, of course. But temptation combined with need (or greed, but in some cases downright need, says Spa – lawyers just starting out and without clients, for instance, or financially embarrassed for other reasons) is a heady mix.

There is in addition the sheer expansion of the profession. Forty years ago it was commonly said of Japan that it was a non-litigious society. The U.S. newsweekly Time in August 1983 called Japan “a land without lawyers,” adding, “Amazingly in this highly competitive and complex island society, there are a mere 12,500 attorneys in private practice, roughly one for every 10,000 citizens. Most Japanese live – and die – without ever having seen a lawyer.”

A growing nation lost its innocence, or at any rate its non-litigiousness. Lawyers now number 45,800, roughly one for every 2700 citizens. “People who in the old days probably wouldn’t have passed the Bar exam can now be lawyers,” lawyer Yuji Miyazawa tells Spa. “With increasing numbers comes, naturally, increasing scandal.”

Let the buyer beware.

© Japan Today