Cases involving sexual deepfakes targeting children more than doubled in number in Japan in the first half of 2026, the National Police Agency has said.<\/p>\n
Police handled 123 such cases in the six months, exceeding both the 60 recorded a year earlier and the 114 logged in all of 2025, the agency said Monday.<\/p>\n
The surge highlights the rapid spread of generative AI and its increasingly sophisticated image-editing capabilities.<\/p>\n
Junior high school students accounted for 79 victims, followed by 38 high school students, three elementary school pupils and three others whose backgrounds could not be determined.<\/p>\n
In 83 cases, the suspected perpetrators were classmates or students attending the same school as the victims. Seven cases involved people who had met the victims through social media or other online platforms.<\/p>\n
Police also identified four cases in which children unknown to the suspects were secretly photographed in public before their images were altered into sexually explicit content.<\/p>\n
Two suspects had been referred to prosecutors by the end of June, while investigations into other cases remain under way.<\/p>\n
The agency said it will step up public awareness campaigns on the illegal use of AI while pursuing criminal investigations into egregious cases and cracking down on such offenses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cases involving sexual deepfakes targeting children more than doubled in number in Japan in the first half of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[16913,44709,2515,8,17,994,4399],"class_list":["post-69186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-child-abuse","tag-child-porn","tag-children","tag-japan","tag-japanese","tag-japanese-police","tag-sex-crimes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}