The company details on a shopping site may belong to someone else

When a store I have never used before shows a company name, a street address and a phone number, I read that as a small reassurance. On 1 September 2026 I read what Japan's two consumer bodies have published about fraudulent online stores, and that reading no longer holds up on its own.

The detail that changed it: the contact block is often not missing. It is filled in with the details of a real company that has nothing to do with the site.

Two Japanese agencies, and why they are worth reading

The Consumer Affairs Agency is the government agency responsible for consumer policy in Japan. The National Consumer Affairs Center is an independent administrative body that collects consumer complaints and publishes what it finds; its Cross-border Consumer center Japan (CCJ) handles cases involving overseas sellers.

Both publish free, dated material. The specifics below are from that material, not from my own testing.

Real details, wrong company

In a release dated 21 May 2025, Online orders that never arrive: the seller's address and contact details may be false, the National Consumer Affairs Center wrote that the business name and contact details shown on a fraudulent store are sometimes not the operator's at all, but those of an unrelated real business, reproduced without permission.

From May 2025 the Center began annotating its published list of fraudulent stores: where a site carries the details of an unrelated business, the entry now says so.

Its 17 June 2026 release includes a case from February 2026 in which the Center's own check of the site found that "the business name, address, telephone number and other business information listed on the site were those of a real, unrelated business, reproduced without permission."

So searching the company name and finding a legitimate business does not settle the question. The company is legitimate. It is just not the one running the store.

27 out of 45

The same report carries the current list as an appendix: 45 sites as of 17 June 2026.

I counted how many entries carry the annotation about unrelated business details. 27 of the 45.

The limits of that count matter as much as the number:

• The report states plainly that the list does not cover every site in existence. This is a proportion within the list, not within fraudulent stores generally
• The annotation practice started in May 2025, but entries added in 2024 also carry it, so some were applied retroactively
• An entry without the annotation is not evidence that its details are genuine

The same day, two versions, different lists

The Center's topic page on avoiding fraudulent online stores is dated 17 June 2026 and carries a six-item checklist. The report PDF published the same day carries nine.

Three things appear only in the PDF: images and wording copied from a consumer marketplace app, payment requests that use a code-payment app's person-to-person "send" function rather than its merchant "pay" function, and this footnote attached to the item about missing business details:

Even where such details are shown, they may be the details of a business unrelated to the site's operator, so care is needed. Especially for a site you are using for the first time, in addition to the points above, check whether there is anything unnatural about the site URL, and whether a separate official site exists.

The checklist annotates its own limits — and the annotation is missing from the version most people will land on. The PDF also says that some fraudulent stores match none of the listed items at all.

The agency's list does not match the Center's

The Consumer Affairs Agency's page Beware of fake sites asks readers to check five things before completing a purchase: whether the URL is that of the official store, whether contact details are shown, whether the price is extremely low, whether payment methods are unusually limited, and whether the Japanese reads naturally.

Three of those clearly overlap with the Center's nine: price, payment methods, and the language on the page. Contact details overlap only in part — the Agency asks whether contact details are shown (phone, email), while the Center's single item covers the seller's name, address and phone number. Only the Center's list mentions the name and the address at all.

The URL check appears only on the Agency's list. Scarce goods being available, missing return and refund terms, a bank account in an individual's name, content copied from a marketplace app, and the code-payment "send" function appear only on the Center's.

Neither list is wrong. They are looking from different angles, and one of them alone is a narrower check than it appears.

What Japanese law asks for is more than presence

Business details on a Japanese store page are there because of the Act on Specified Commercial Transactions. Reading the Consumer Affairs Agency's guide to mail-order advertising, the requirement is about the quality of those details, not only their presence:

• The name must be the registered corporate name, or for a sole trader the legal personal name or registered trade name. A nickname, an unregistered trading name or the site's own name does not satisfy it
• The address must be where the business actually operates. An address with the street number omitted does not satisfy it, and neither does a PO box alone
• The phone number must be one that reaches the business. A number that is unused — or one that is answered by nobody as a matter of policy — does not satisfy it
• A company advertising online must also show the name of its representative director or the person responsible for its mail-order operations

The guide is also where the familiar link labels come from. It accepts a link or tab labelled "特定商取引法に基づく表記" (notation based on the Act) or "会社概要" (company profile) as an acceptable route from the top of the page to the required details.

One more point of scope, from a footnote in the Center's report: if a site sells to Japan — displaying in Japanese, for example — and the buyer lives in Japan, the Act applies. A store that appears to be operated from overseas is not automatically outside it.

Where my own reading starts

Everything above is from the published material. What follows is mine, as someone who builds checking tools.

Confirming that a company exists does not catch this. The company does exist. So I stopped looking for a single item that decides the question, and started reading several at once: the URL, whether a separate official site exists, who is named as the operator, whether the address and phone number are in a complete form, whether return and refund terms are stated, whether the price and the payment options look ordinary. What I am counting is how many of them feel off, not whether any single one passes.

Doing that on every unfamiliar store is tedious. The details sit in different places — a footer, a company page, terms, a privacy policy — and the ones that are absent are the easiest to miss, because nothing marks their absence.

It does not judge a site as safe or unsafe. It lists what the page says and what it does not say, which is a different and much smaller claim.

What I could not confirm

• The Act allows some advertised items to be omitted if the seller states that it will supply them without delay on request. Whether the name, address and phone number fall within that exemption is set out in the enforcement regulations, which I did not read, so this article does not cover it
• The CCJ website that hosts the list of fraudulent stores is scheduled for a redesign from September 2026, according to the report. The links here may move

Sources

All accessed 1 September 2026. All are published in Japanese; the English titles above are my translations.

The figure of 27 out of 45 is my own count of the appendix as it stood on 17 June 2026. It is not published as a total in the source.

Neither agency endorses or guarantees any particular product or service, including the tool mentioned here.