Kamokamo

I love Japanese public-service ads. Meet Kamokamo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's cutest weapon in the war against scammers who rip off unwitting consumers. The green-headed, duck-like mascot's name itself is a pun: kamo kamo roughly translates into "I may be a sitting duck."

Japan may be one of the safest places in the world with regards to violent crimes, but confidence scams in which con artists convince victims to withdraw staggering amounts of money from their accounts under various pretexts have been on the rise for years. Perhaps the most famous of these is the "moshi moshi sagi," or "hello scam," in which someone calls an elderly victim and fast-talks them into believing they're a son or relative in need of emergency funds. (That such a bold con works so frequently is also a statement about family affairs in Japan, but that's another story for another time.)

Another common scam -- illustrated by Mr. Kamokamo himself in this flash animation -- involves setting up a fake dating (i.e., prostitution) site, tracking down the people who enter their personal information, and then forcing them to pay huge trumped-up usage fees. It's a modern twist on the ol' Kabukicho scam of guiding a mark into your bar, selling him drinks without telling him the price, and then locking the doors until he pays a small fortune to gain freedom.

Kamokamo appears in public service announcements for all kinds of consumer cheats and cons. In the poster above he warns of direct-sales scams (going door to door offering fake home safety improvements is a popular one these days, too.) Here a gaggle of kamokamos get their proverbial gooses cooked by a fiendish-looking heron, whose own name is a homonym for "scam" in Japanese (sagi). The message at bottom reads, "If it's too good to be true, it probably is." Words to live by.