Hong Kong victims swindled out of HK$13m as mainland China phone scam cases soar
One victim swindled out of HK$8m after being told he was being probed for money laundering
PUBLISHED : Monday, 15 June, 2015, 1:00am
UPDATED : Monday, 15 June, 2015, 1:00am
Shirley Zhao [email protected]
33 phone scams were reported between January and May this year, all involved fraudsters based on the mainland China. Photo: Reuters
Phone scams involving swindlers posing as mainland law enforcement officials and asking for victims' bank details increased 11-fold in the first five months of this year, police have revealed.
In one case, a retired businessman had HK$8 million taken out of his bank account.
Chief Inspector Lam Cheuk-ho, of Kowloon East regional crime unit, said 33 scams were reported between January and May, compared to just three in the same period last year.
Among this year's cases, scammers cheated 19 victims out of a total of around HK$13 million. All the cases involved fraudsters based on the mainland.
Lam said investigating and solving such cases would be more difficult. "These are cross-border crimes so we need to cooperate with the mainland police. We have frequent exchanges of information."
The 19 victims this year comprise 10 men and nine women aged from 18 to 68.
They include mainland students, businesspeople and insurance sellers.
Lam said all the victims visited the mainland often, and had mainland bank accounts and mobile phone numbers.
He suspected the scammers hacked into online databases or bought personal information such as phone numbers and names and used the information collected to target victims.
The swindlers typically call the victims and tell them the caller is a mainland law enforcement officer investigating money laundering involving the individuals' bank accounts.
In other cases, they might pretend to be bank or delivery company staff telling the victims about problems with their accounts, or parcels for delivery that had been confiscated for containing banned items.
They might tell the unsuspecting victims to call other numbers - answered by scammers - to "prove" the caller's identity.
Other victims are asked to go to fake websites that resemble those of mainland police or law enforcement departments.
Victims then key in their identity card number, bank account number, account password, online account password and other information following the scammers' instructions, only to discover later that money has been withdrawn from their accounts.
The retiree who was swindled out of HK$8 million was told in March that his mainland bank account was under investigation for money laundering. This and other cases are still under investigation and no arrests have been made in Hong Kong.
"In many cases, the victims might have been scared by the calls," Lam said. "They didn't know if they could be subject to an investigation and thought that by following the instructions they could prove their innocence."
Lam urged citizens to be extra careful if any callers asked them to provide bank details.
