Hong Kong police have arrested 50 people in connection with an alleged HK$3.5 million (US$446,930) luxury goods scam involving fake cheques and bogus bank deposit drafts.
Police said the suspects – 34 men and 16 women aged between 15 and 52 – posed as buyers to approach sellers of luxury bags, watches and wines on social media and other e-commerce platforms.
“[The suspects] showed receipts in a bid to prove to the sellers that they had already deposited the cheque,” said Chief Inspector Bonnie Ngan Hoi-ian of the cyber intelligence division.
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“Sellers mailed out the items, but found the deposit did not go through a few days later and the scammer had blocked them.”
Ngan added some of the fraudsters had sent fake cheques worth more than the price of the goods and asked the sellers to refund the extra money, which amounted to tens of thousands of Hong Kong dollars.
Police said on Friday the 50 were detained between August 7 and 18.
The amount lost in online shopping scams in the first half of the year was HK$94.1 million, 2.6 times more than the HK$36.2 million recorded in the same period of 2022, the division’s Superintendent Chan Shun-ching said.
“Last year, one online scam was reported every 20 minutes,” he added. “This year, the frequency increased to one case every 14 minutes.”
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Reported cases rose to 4,872 by the end of June, up 23 per cent from the 3,954 incidents recorded in the same period last year.
Fraudsters in two-thirds of the cases used the Faster Payment System (FPS) to carry out transactions related to luxury goods, concert tickets, theme park entry tickets and hotel stay packages, as well as for other goods and services.
The victims were aged between 11 and 76. Chan said the 11-year-old complained to police after she lost more than HK$6,000 when she tried to buy concert tickets on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu.
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Facebook and Carousell are also popular platforms for scammers, the force has warned.
Police added they had flagged more than 5,000 accounts or pages with suspicious activity to Facebook and its parent company Meta in the past six months, with more than 95 per cent of them taken down.
When determining whether a cheque had been deposited, sellers should look at the available balance instead of the account balance, Ngan suggested. The account balance included pending transactions, which could mislead sellers into thinking the money had indeed been transferred, she said.
“Sellers should avoid accepting cheque payments, and if they do so, they should pay attention to whether their available balance has increased to see if the cheque has been deposited, instead of only looking at the account balance,” she said.
Police said they would work with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the Hong Kong Association of Banks to produce a blacklist of payees on the FPS platform by the end of the year.
“The scam alert will give an instant warning to Hongkongers whenever they are transferring money via FPS to a high-risk account,” Chan explained. “They will receive an alert that the payee is in our database so they should think twice about proceeding.”
More from South China Morning Post:
- 187 Hongkongers lose total of HK$1.3 million in online shopping scams over 1 week, prompting police warning before Mother’s Day
- Hong Kong, mainland Chinese police arrest 17 suspects in connection with 149 online fraud cases, including writers of scripted scam dialogue
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