Phone Scammers Getting Creative, Warn Police

Con artists are coming up with new and inventive ways to cheat people out of their hard-earned money through phone scams, police say, with some even accusing victims of violating the national security law to scare them into handing over large sums of cash.

Officers have dealt with almost 900 telephone deception cases this year – a jump of around 130 percent from last year – in which the victims are said to have handed over a total of HK$420 million.

Two alleged victims say they were cheated out of HK$900,000 after they received calls from people saying they had violated the national security law.

But a far more common tactic was for the alleged scammers to pretend to be mainland officials, informing the victims that they were involved in crimes across the border.

They would be told to deal with it by either paying cash, or giving them their bank details for investigation.

Police say more than half the phone scam cases involved this ruse.

The youngest purported victim, was a 14-year-old boy, who was said to have handed over HK$200,000 to a woman who claimed to be some sort of special agent.

Another new tactic that police have identified, is for con artists to tell their victims to open online banking accounts, and to install a malicious app on their smartphones.

Chief inspector Bonnie Ngan of the force’s anti-deception coordination centre, said scammers used to tell victims to transfer money in person at banks, but there are limits to the amount of funds that can be transferred in this way, and bank staff are getting increasingly wary of their tactics.

The app, she explained, works even more insidiously.

“One of the main functions of the malicious app is that it can divert the bank notification SMS from the victim’s phones to the scammers’. So by controlling the victim’s e-banking [account], the scammers can transfer all the money out without the notice of the victim,” Ngan said.

Senior inspector Tang Tak-yeung from the force’s public relations branch also shared his own experience in dealing with phone scammers over a course of six days.

He said con artists even dressed up as mainland police in a video call to make their story more believable.

“They tried really hard to make me believe the story … The whole scam is really sophisticated because they know how to manipulate the victim’s psychology. They tried to show that they sacrificed a lot to clear my name,” he said.

The police say they are stepping up publicity to warn people not to be duped by telephone scammers.