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In order to bolster the Force’s capability to combat frauds and raise the public’s anti-scam awareness, the Commercial Crime Bureau (CCB) set up the Anti-Deception Coordination Centre (ADCC) in July 2017. The Centre performs a wide range of functions, such as operating a 24-hour “Anti-Scam Helpline 18222”, collaborating with INTERPOL to activate the “International Stop-Payment Mechanism” to mitigate citizens’ monetary losses, and carrying out missions such as promoting anti-scam tips and formulating strategies to crack down on frauds.
Over the past three years, ADCC received a total of
65 824 calls from members of the public. Not only did the Centre successfully quash 679 scams in progress by persuading the would-be victims to pull the plug on their payments, it also intercepted HKD$6.33 billion worth of payments to fraudsters around the world in 1 586 scams.
One of the “stop-payment” cases involving a huge sum of money occurred in February this year. According to Chief Inspector Ngan Hoi-ian of the CCB, a person in charge of a local clinic who was sourcing face masks from overseas sellers on the Internet received an email from a self-proclaimed wholesaler, who claimed to be able to supply a huge batch of face masks and protective gowns. The person in charge then remitted 2.32 million euros to the 14 bank accounts of the “wholesaler” that were scattered in seven foreign countries, including the United States. Shortly afterwards, the person in charge suspected a scam and reported the case to the Hong Kong Police. Although the money had been remitted more than a week ago, ADCC still managed to stop the transfer of 1.73 million euros among the whole payment, significantly cutting the victim’s loss by more than half already.
Since its inception, ADCC has received numerous calls from members of the public every day, who are either making enquiries or seeking help. Firmly believing that “Every victim matters. Every dollar counts,” ADCC officers pledge to lift as many victims out of frauds as possible.
In recent years, online romance scams have been prevalent. Since a lot of victims are so “love-struck”, it takes a tremendous amount of patience and skills to open their eyes to the fact that they have been swindled. Police Constable Ah Chuen, who answers calls to the “Anti-Scam Helpline”, said the officers would give the callers “spoilers”, detailing what they believed had happened between the victims and their “lovers”. The victims would often be surprised by how predictable the dialogues between their “lovers” and themselves were to the Police. Meanwhile, the officers would also guide the victims to fact-check their interactions with their “lovers”, to help them foil the scams by themselves.
Ah Chuen continued, “Under the guise of ‘gifting’, scammers would trick their victims into paying huge sums of shipping fees. It is indeed a common modus operandi of online scammers. One of our tactics is to ask the victims to vet the shipping fees themselves. Once it dawned on them that it was impossible to incur tens of thousands of dollars of shipping fees, they had a ‘rude awakening’. However, a lot of victims broke down in tears after they realised they had fallen under the spell of ‘phantom lovers’ all along.”
Detective Police Constable Ah Yee pointed out that banks play a crucial role when it comes to fighting scams. For example, when bank staff suspect that someone was posing as the genuine account holders to withdraw cash, or have a hunch that someone was indeed remitting money to scammers’ accounts, they would call ADCC for assistance, which would in turn contact the Scams Response Team of each police district to deploy officers to carry out investigation at the bank.
Nowadays, when coming up with new plots, scammers are becoming more and more adept at capitalising on the latest development in society. For instance, some scammers have tricked citizens into disclosing their personal particulars and account details, under the pretext of helping them register for the Cash Payout Scheme recently rolled out by the Government. In response to ever-evolving frauds, ADCC has to constantly modify its strategies, in the hope of nipping all scams in the bud.
