Hong Kong is seeing an alarming rise in scams, with victims from all walks of life. Here’s how police are ramping up the war on borderless crimes
- Number of scams shot up to 19,444 in first nine months of 2022, ‘but it could have been much worse’
- Police add more officers, tech expertise to obstruct criminals and alert potential victims in time
Chief Superintendent Kelly Cheng Lai-ki spent decades in Hong Kong’s police force dealing with everything from commercial and financial crime to gang activities and child and sex abuse.
Many of those cases were tough, but they were not quite as hard as dealing with online crime and scams which have proliferated in recent years, said the head of the force’s cybersecurity and technology crime bureau.
“The most challenging thing is that online scams are cross-boundary and anonymous,” she told the Post. “The physical world has boundaries – you can hunt down suspects or fly to another jurisdiction to help with arrests. But the online world is vast and borderless.”
The number of scams in Hong Kong leapt from 8,216 cases in 2019 to 15,553 cases in 2020, and 19,249 cases last year. In the first nine months of this year, there were 19,444 scams, more than over the whole of last year.
These included deception through the internet, over the phone or face-to-face.
Cheng said Hong Kong’s police were up against a global trend in crime enabled by the rise of the internet and made worse during Covid-19 pandemic when people stayed home and went online to work, shop and look for love.
Scammers lost no time exploiting the increased reliance on technology to enter the same space and cheat people.
What made it worse was that the surge occurred even as the city’s overall crime rate remained largely stable. Scams are arguably a bigger headache for police now than theft and violent crimes.
