When Marita Kwan bought some books from a small internet retailer last year, she had no idea she was about to be cyber-mugged. After submitting her order with her credit card number to the site, she received confirmation and logged off.
Little did she suspect that cyber thieves based in South Korea had hacked into the site and stolen her credit card details. Within hours they had made a copy of her card, which they used to rack up to HK$50,000 in charges including massages, hotel rooms and an expensive bar tab.
Kwan's experience is increasingly common in Hong Kong, one of the most wired cities in the world. With 80 per cent of households connected to the internet via broadband, cyber criminals are attracted to the rich pickings provided by the poor security of many sites.
But there is another attraction for these 21st century highway robbers - they are virtually guaranteed to get away with it. Few cyber criminals - less than 3 per cent of reported computer crimes - are brought to justice.
Questions are now being raised about whether Hong Kong's cybercrime laws are falling behind international trends and whether this poses a threat to an economy intrinsically linked to electronic communication.
Michelle Chan, a partner at Herbert Smith in Hong Kong, notes that most of the computer crime laws 'addressed the problems that existed in the early 1990s before the internet boom in the millennium ... [and] there has been relatively little progress in legislative development in relation to cybercrimes since 1993'.
Hong Kong's laws appear largely powerless to prevent the growing scourge of identity theft, which often allows cyber criminals to defraud the victim and third parties by 'impersonating' that person online.
