Senior Superintendent Neil Chan Tat-ming has never forgotten the 80-year-old man who reported being swindled out of more than HK$300,000 by a phone scammer claiming to be his son.
Phone scam losses reported to police ballooned 35 times from HK$16 million in 2005, when such records began, to HK$317mil in 2015, and HK$574mil last year. He never imagined phone scams would grow into a multibillion-dollar transnational enterprise. But 20 years later, more victims are turning up, and the sums involved are staggering.“Successfully fishing one victim is like winning the jackpot,” Chan said. “What kind of business shows a profit of HK$250mil in a single attempt?”
“The call would start with ‘Hi Dad!’ The victim might reply saying, ‘Hey Wai! You haven’t come back for dinner recently!’” he said. The scammers used mind games, said Vince Ho Wing-sze, a police clinical psychologist who has been studying the emotional traps set by phone fraudsters since 2017.“A person gets terrified when threatened with possible arrest,” Ho said, adding that people tended to believe officials or law enforcers.
Chief Inspector Bonnie Ngan Hoi-ian, from the anti-deception coordination centre set up in July 2017, said the con artists usually played both “bad guy and good guy”. “Victims might think handing over the account password does not mean giving away their money,” Ngan said.Retiree Chan, 71, who is childless and lives alone, was shocked when a caller identified himself as a mainland official in April and accused her of breaking the national security law.
Ngan recalled another woman, aged 67, who reported to police only in April this year that she transferred HK$4mil to scammers in January 2019. Ngan said: “She asked him to hang up immediately or they would be in deeper trouble, as she has been under investigations by mainland officials for more than two years.”Ngan said she asked the woman why she believed the con men. The woman replied that some time after her money was gone, she was distributing newspapers in the street when two men came up to her and took her photo.
Ngan said the victims included many well-educated individuals who were graduates of top mainland universities.