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Cybersecurity
TechPolicy

Byte-sized bandits: AI is levelling-up scammers but also helping Hongkongers fight back

  • Fraudsters are using AI to convincingly portray themselves as acquaintances and steal digital identities, driving demand for hi-tech cybersecurity solutions

Reading Time:6 minutes
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Emerging technologies have given online fraudsters new levels of sophistication, but they are also helping cybersecurity companies fight back. Illustration: Henry Wong
Kelly Le
In the second of a two-part series, Kelly Le looks at how cybersecurity firms are using AI to fight back against the increasingly sophisticated digital scams plaguing Hong Kong.
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On a quiet Saturday morning in mid-July, Angeline Lian received a WhatsApp message from her landlord about a lease renewal deal that looked too good to refuse: save HK$20,000 if she pays HK$100,000 for the next year up front.

The 25-year-old from Shanghai, who has been working in Hong Kong for a year after completing a master’s degree, thought this must be common practice in the city. So she transferred HK$50,000, her entire savings, as the first half of the payment to a new account under a new lease agreement.

Details of the deal began to unravel fast. Friends reached out on WeChat, the Chinese messaging platform owned by Tencent Holdings, to ask about weird messages they received from her on WhatsApp. She then discovered that her landlord and friends had been blocked on the popular Meta Platforms-owned app for an indeterminate amount of time. The scam, it turns out, had originated with a phishing link urging her to verify her WhatsApp account to avoid deactivation within 24 hours.

Lian’s case is not unique in Hong Kong. The city saw 39,000 scams filed with the Hong Kong Police in 2023 alone, resulting in about HK$9 billion (US$1.16 billion) in losses – a significant increase from the HK$4.8 billion lost to scams in 27,923 cases in 2022. Cases were up 31 per cent in the first half of this year with HK$2.66 billion in losses, according to the Hong Kong Police Force.

Cyber fraud is nothing new, and Hong Kong has long struggled to contain it. But emerging technologies, and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in particular, have helped make online scams all the more convincing. This has required ever more sophisticated tools, some themselves assisted by AI, to fight back.
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SCMP Series
How financial scammers target Hongkongers
[ 2 of 5 ]
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