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.)
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.
This leads to a hell of a dystopia, but spammers have left me no choice but to contemplate dystopias.