Letters | Can Hong Kong really get ahead of scammers?

Readers discuss how ubiquitous scams and fraud have become, why rule of law matters in discussions on marriage equality and help for our struggling elderly

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Commissioner of Police Raymond Siu attends the launch of five minibuses carrying adverts that promote scam prevention, on September 19. Photo: May Tse

Published: 11:30am, 31 Oct 2024

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I refer to your interview with the Commissioner of Police Raymond Siu Chak-yee, in which he shared how the police are tackling rampant scams in Hong Kong, which in the first three quarters of the year have already led to HK$6.41 billion (US$824.9 million) in losses.

My recent close brush suggests the problem won’t be easily solved. I received an SMS message one evening supposedly from Mannings, reminding me to redeem my reward points for a gift, as I had done in the past.

The link in the message led me to a webpage, where I selected a gift and tried to complete the transaction. At this stage I received a message from my bank’s mobile app asking me to approve a credit card payment of US$699.99 to the merchant “HuntGame”. It was then that I realised it was a scam.

The SMS message, webpage and checkout interface did not look any different than before. The close encounter sent a chill up my spine.

I contacted the Mannings customer support to report this incident and suspended my credit card, for fear my card details had been compromised. I see now that the Mannings website carries a recently published security alert advising customers that the company is a “registered sender” under the SMS Sender Registration Scheme. As a result, all its SMSes begin with the prefix “#”, and the sender’s name will appear as “#Mannings”. This is to distinguish the company from fraudsters. But I wonder: would a customer notice a difference in prefix?