On 24 April 2026, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority announced the results of a coordinated global 'week of action' against illegal finfluencers — social-media personalities who promote unauthorized investments and financial products. The campaign, which began on 20 April, drew in 17 regulators, among them Australia's ASIC, Singapore's MAS, India's SEBI, Hong Kong's SFC, Brazil's CVM, New Zealand's FMA and the Central Bank of Ireland (FCA). One major financial center was conspicuously absent: Japan. Its Financial Services Agency did not join, opting instead for strengthened 'monitoring' and reliance on voluntary industry measures.
That choice deserves scrutiny — not because Japan needs to copy every enforcement fashion, but because its own data describes a problem that monitoring alone has plainly failed to contain.
The case for caution — taken seriously
The FSA's restraint is not irrational. Aggressive enforcement against online financial speech carries real costs that a publication committed to the open internet should name first. Heavy-handed campaigns can chill legitimate commentary: most people posting about markets are not fraudsters, and a regulator that treats every stock tip as a potential crime risks pushing ordinary financial education off-platform. Japan also already has tools. The Act Against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations bans undisclosed sponsored content — 'stealth marketing' — and the Consumer Affairs Agency used it in June 2024 against a clinic that traded discounts for undisclosed five-star reviews (ICLG). The FSA's preference for surveillance and persuasion over prosecution reflects a defensible instinct: regulate the conduct, not the medium, and avoid blunt instruments that punish speech.
The trouble is that the conduct in question is not edgy speech. It is fraud — and the numbers are moving in the wrong direction fast.
What the data actually shows
Japan's National Police Agency has been warning for two years that 'SNS-type' investment and romance fraud is surging, with individual losses frequently exceeding ¥10 million (NPA notice via Digital Agency). In 2024, victims lost a record ¥126.8 billion (about $835 million) to romance and investment scams run through social media — more than double the prior year. Investment fraud alone accounted for 6,380 cases (VnExpress / NPA). Preliminary 2025 figures released by the NPA put total fraud losses at a fresh record, with SNS-driven investment scams again rising sharply.
The mechanism is well documented. Scammers buy social-media advertising that splices the names and faces of real public figures — Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa among them — onto fake high-return investment pitches. The harm became prominent enough that an impersonated celebrity and victims sued Meta in Japanese court over the ads (ICLG). This is not a gray area of financial influencing. It is impersonation and securities fraud delivered through the ad-targeting pipe.
Why enforcement is the proportionate tool here
Here the pro-innovation case and the enforcement case converge rather than collide. Fraudulent investment ads are not a feature of a healthy online speech market; they are a tax on it. They poison trust in legitimate finfluencers, give cover to the very 'online safety' maximalists who would rather restrict the platforms wholesale, and hand regulators a pretext for the blunt, speech-suppressing measures that genuinely threaten the open internet — age-gating, platform liability for all user content, and outright access bans of the sort the EFF has documented spreading through US statehouses (EFF). The targeted alternative is better on every axis: it goes after identifiable bad actors and specific unlawful conduct, leaves lawful speech untouched, and is exactly what the 17-regulator coalition did.
Look at what coordinated enforcement produced in a single week. In the UK alone, the FCA secured a guilty plea, opened criminal proceedings against two more individuals, issued 34 new warning alerts, and made 120 platform-takedown requests covering 1,267 illegal financial adverts that had reached roughly 2.3 million accounts (FCA). That is precision work — warnings, takedowns of specific unlawful ads, prosecutions of specific people — not a crackdown on financial discourse.
The monitoring gap
Japan is not short of legal authority. The FSA administers the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act and is moving crypto-asset oversight under it, and it maintains supervisory guidelines across the financial sector (FSA). What 'monitoring plus voluntary measures' lacks is the cross-border coordination that fraud rings — which operate from outside Japan and advertise across global platforms — actually require. A scam network indifferent to a single national regulator's surveillance is precisely the case for the joint takedown requests and synchronized warnings that the April coalition demonstrated.
The lesson is not that Japan should police speech more. It is that it should police fraud more — and join the others in doing so. Sitting out a coordinated enforcement week while posting record victim losses is the worst of both worlds: it neither protects consumers nor preserves an open speech environment, because unchecked fraud is itself the strongest argument the censors have. Proportionate regulation means hitting the crime hard so the platform never has to be hit at all.