Near as I can tell, a lot of the fraud is exploitation of the known and not yet solved ‘remote jurisdiction’ issue.

When someone is far away, and in a different jurisdiction, it’s hard to track them down and do anything to them.

Not likely to get better anytime soon, unfortunately.

And even if you can both track them down and hand evidence of wrongdoing on a silver platter to law enforcement in their jurisdiction, often the places these criminals operate out of were selected specifically because their justice system is corrupt and easily bribed. Often, these fraudsters can even talk local politicians into seeing their (cover) businesses as “important local industries, employing local citizens, generating taxable income, and making charitable donations.”

This is the strategy used by the harder-to-kill scam call-centres in India; certain cities in India (I believe Hyderabad?) have been repeatedly handed damning evidence of criminal acts by scammers operating there, but it gets swept under the rug every time. When a big-enough stink is made that it makes their own local news, they just give the criminals a slap on the wrist or lest (e.g. an arrest on low bail that they easily afford to pay, with the case then being dropped before it ever goes to trial, as soon as it’s out of the news.)

The US has the power to really cause damage to India (and well any other country). They can cause a stink on the UN front and if that does not work, escalate financially like they do to countries like Iran. Its just not that important for the extremely old and corrupt leadership at the top to care about though. I suspect once someone from the internet generation takes the presidency, there will be some chance of something changing.

If they wanted to do so. But historically, India hasn’t been very aligned with the US. They’re more Russian aligned.

Bounty hunters are not really a thing in the way you’re thinking - they can’t just go to Japan, investigate someone, arrest them and bring back someone from there for instance. They’re for returning someone already arrested who jumped bail somewhere. And they typically don’t work internationally, as their legality is dubious even within a specific jurisdiction.

For something major, it’s generally already possible to investigate and get someone extradited already, for instance, when the cultural gaps aren’t too large and the cultures have a common agreement on what a ‘major crime’ is and looks like. Murder, for instance.

The issue is the bar for ‘major enough’ gets higher and higher the more jurisdictions/cultures you cross, and it is super easy now to scam across a large enough gap there that no one is going to arrest or participate in investigating all but the largest and most blatant scams.

Good luck getting someone arrested in Russia, Nigeria, China, etc. for wire fraud, for example.

You wouldn’t send a bounty hunter to Japan. You’d hire a Japanese bounty hunter who operates in Japan. Or, more specifically, you’d put up a bounty for someone’s arrest in Japan, and one or more Japanese bounty hunters would “take on” the bounty.

Also, the goal of hiring a bounty hunter, presumably, wouldn’t be to get them arrested for things that are crimes in some other country, but rather to get them arrested for things that are crimes in their own country (or in whatever country they happen to be hiding it.)

This isn’t Star Wars or the Wild West btw.

Bounties in the US are issued by the court. You can’t issue one as a private person.

For it to be legal for a bounty hunter to do anything, they need to comply with some laws while doing it. Otherwise, it’s false arrest and/or kidnapping.

Which I’m sure with some work, and a lot of money, some folks would be willing to do for you. However, I doubt it would go well for anyone, and certainly wouldn’t result in the person being taken going to jail if all they did was scam someone.

Targeted International kidnapping (human trafficking?) is one of the ‘quite serious’ things likely to get whoever initiated it tracked down and thrown in jail though.

Near as I can tell, only the Philippines has a similar system.

It gets a lot of press and there are a lot of legends around it, but it isn’t what you think.

The formal system for having someone arrested and sent to another county is extradition, and it works rather differently. It’s slow, expensive, and rarely used outside of serious crimes.

Having someone arrested, tried, and penalized in another country for committing a crime against you somewhere else is also not easy.

1) often the courts in the attackers country will say they have no jurisdiction to try them, as the crimes were committed elsewhere. This can also happen if you try it in the victims country.

2) you run across all sorts of ‘meh, don’t care’ issues when the attacker is bringing in good money locally and the victims are seen as ‘not here/not anyone we care about’

3) good luck collecting evidence, making a case, getting them arrested, etc. in a foreign county, speaking a foreign language, with a legal system that you don’t understand. It’s hard enough doing it when it’s local.

4) if the local legal system is known for corruption, good luck figuring out which buttons to push. The attacker almost certainly is already familiar with them.

Not impossible. But the costs can easily be > $100k, sometimes in the millions.

Hence the ‘serious enough’ bar too.

What would the Japanese bounty hunter arrest the person in Japan for and on who’s authority?

I'm also interested in knowing which law-enforcement divisions are actively interested in taking on fraud cases -- if the community finds it, which divisions and prosecutors are fired up about chasing down online fraud?

Seems like a great way for an ambitious team to make a popular difference in the world.