Phone scammers target people with mainland backgrounds

Phone scams by con artists pretending to be the authorities have shown no signs of abating in the first half of this year and people with mainland backgrounds have become a vulnerable victim group, Hong Kong police said on Tuesday.

The tactic of falsely claiming to be the authorities, which emerged only in 2015, has topped the list of common means con artists adopted in phone scams, accounting for two-thirds of the 443 phone scam cases in first half of this year.

Police said visitors or new arrivals from the mainland are particularity vulnerable to this new tactic.

Police data show that among victims who fell for the tactic and were duped out of money in the first half, 31 percent were mainland people who stayed in Hong Kong for study, work and family visits. A further 10 percent of such victims were new immigrants from the mainland.

Con artists usually pretend to be officers from the Immigration Department, telling victims something went wrong with their credentials and then transferring the victims’ call to bogus mainland authorities to “handle” their bogus cases, said Chan Tinchu, superintendent of the Counterfeit and Forgery Division of the Commercial Crime Bureau in the Hong Kong Police Force.

Chan said people with mainland backgrounds fell victim more easily because the scams seemed plausible to them. Problems fabricated by the phone scammers sounded real because they had indeed dealt with the Immigration Department before for residency paperwork.

A Hong Kong University of Science and Technology student from the mainland was duped out of HK$4.4 million from December last year to June this year as a fake mainland police officer told her that her name was put under a parcel that contained restricted items.

Chan noted that most of the con artists were not physically in Hong Kong but scattered around the world, using internet telephone services provided by overseas servers to call victims. Chan, therefore, warned that people should be especially cautious when picking up phone calls in Hong Kong with numbers that start with +852.

The 443 phone scam cases this year marked an 8 percent year-on-year increase, but the amount lost in the scams jumped by 37.6 percent to HK$147.25 million.