Pay first, sex later? Hong Kong elderly man among 90 victims who lost HK$4 million in two weeks in ‘compensated dating’ scams
The cases in the first two weeks of 2024 prompted the police to issue a scam alert on the CyberDefender Facebook page earlier this week warning those seeking sex: “Advance payment for compensated dating? Don’t be too naive.”
Police advised the public to be on the alert, stressing that “any situation that requires you to purchase point cards for online games or gift cards before engaging in compensated dating is a scam”.
The victims were all men. The 70-year-old victim told police he exchanged text messages on a social media platform with someone he believed was an attractive young woman.
“The woman offered sexual services but asked the elderly man to purchase iTunes gift cards and send her the cards’ passwords as a deposit,” police said.
The man bought HK$50,000 worth of gift cards and sent on the passwords. He only realised he had been tricked when the scammer vanished.
Last year’s 2,100 reports were up from 1,900 cases in 2022 and the total reported lost rose by more than a third from the previous year’s HK$72.4 million.
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The number of cases has risen in recent years, going from 746 in 2018 to 1,743 in 2021. The total reported losses also went up from HK$32.2 million to HK$63 million over that period.
A source familiar with the trend said the scammers could be men who used photos of attractive Asian women found online to create fake profiles on social media platforms or dating apps, befriending their targets through messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and WeChat.
He said the scammers usually claimed to be Hong Kong students or women from mainland China and Taiwan doing compensated dating for pocket money.
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Before meeting for the “date”, the victims are told to pay a deposit in advance using game point cards, gift cards or virtual assets. After the payment is made, the “girls” do not show up.
“Some so-called compensated dating girls claimed they were locked up by prostitution syndicates and begged their victims to help them pay money to be freed,” the source said.
He said the increase in the total amount swindled reflected cases in which victims lost more than HK$1 million each.
A man reported losing around HK$1.6 million last November and another said he lost more than HK$2 million last month.
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Some fraudsters coaxed targets into revealing personal information, which they then used to blackmail the victims.
“Victims were asked to send a copy of their identity card to prove they were not undercover police officers,” the insider said. “The scammers would then extort money from them by threatening to tell their family members about their demand for sexual services.”
The source said such threats were how some victims had lost huge sums, with some victims potentially feeling too embarrassed to come forward or they have lost a relatively small amount of money.