Hong Kong police anti-fraud squad foils transfer of HK$1.1 billion to scammers in first 10 months of year
Anti-fraud officers started to track her money after they got a stop-payment request in March. Police did not say whether the case was among the 814 between January and October this year where they were able to intercept the funds.
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Scam victims living outside the city were tricked through several types of deception, such as telephone scams, bogus investment deals, online romance traps and email fraud.
The anti-fraud squad intercepted a total of HK$12.3 billion in 4,546 stop-payment requests from July 2017, when it was set up, until October 31, police said.
The team recovered HK$1.36 billion last year, down from HK$2.35 billion in 2021, HK$3.07 billion in 2020 and HK$3.03 billion in 2019.
It thwarted scammers by blocking transactions involving HK$1.42 billion between July 2017 and December 2018.

“With technological advancement, the global payment landscape has been developing rapidly, and the scammers have taken advantage of new transaction mediums in the layering process to increase the difficulty and time required to trace proceeds of crime,” police said.
The force has worked with regulatory authorities, city banking institutions, mainland Chinese authorities and overseas law enforcement agencies to improve its ability to prevent scams and recover money lost by victims.
It set up a stop-payment mechanism with Interpol in October 2019 to track down scam proceeds across borders.
A police spokesman said that, by October 20 this year, HK$410 million swindled from Hongkongers was intercepted in bank accounts overseas with Interpol’s help in the previous four years.
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Hong Kong recorded a 52.1 per cent increase in all types of deception, with 33,923 cases and losses of HK$7.2 billion reported in the first 10 months of the year.
The number of online investment scams reported surged to an all-time high over the same period, with losses from more than 4,000 cases hitting nearly HK$2.5 billion.
The number of bogus investment deals leapt to 4,045 from 1,503 in the same period last year and losses shot up to HK$2.48 billion from HK$769 million.
The Anti-Deception Coordination Centre, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and 10 major banks joined forces to establish the Anti-Deception Alliance last month to combat scams and deception through a collaborative public-private partnership.
“Staff from the 10 banks are deployed to work in the alliance to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of stop-payment processing, facilitate immediate scam intervention through real time coordination with banks, and to accelerate intelligence exchange to speed up investigation and enforcement actions,” the force said.
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Police since May have joined the banking industry to implement an “Upstream Scam Intervention” mechanism, which involves identifying and alerting potential victims as early as possible to prevent them suffering further financial losses.
The anti-fraud squad stopped 320 continuing scams by giving timely advice to victims identified through the scheme up to October 31.
Police advised the public to use the force’s Scameter search engine, accessible through the CyberDefender website, to check for suspicious or fraudulent schemes.
The search engine has information to help users identify suspicious web addresses, emails, platform usernames, bank accounts, mobile phone numbers and IP addresses.