Govt Wants Real Name Registration for SIM Cards

The government wants to know who is using SIM cards

In a bid to supposedly cut down on crime in the city, the government is proposing every SIM card is registered under a real name along with other personal details.

The proposal was made yesterday to kick off a one-month public consultation, where users of prepaid SIM cards need to provide their full name, a copy of their ID and date of birth.

Many people buy prepaid SIM cards when visiting Hong Kong for a few days, or people with no fixed address prefer to use them, or even those who would rather pay as they use the phone than be obligated to sign a contract for a package with a telecom company.

Pre-paid SIM cards are cheaper than contracts

However, the government seems to think the anonymous pay-as-you-go SIM cards allow criminals to evade detection when committing offenses such as phone scams. The Commerce and Economic Development Bureau added the cards were used in serious and violent crimes that affected public security.

Sounds very dramatic.

Nevertheless this proposal is yet another step in mainlandizing Hong Kong. Back in 2017 when my parents and I traveled the Silk Road tour, our fellow travelers and I tried to buy SIM cards in Lanzhou and were immediately denied because we did not have Chinese ID cards. It was virtually impossible for us to get them so we had to rely on wifi in our hotels.

Maybe the government is uneasy about the numbers, as there are currently 11.7 million prepaid SIM cards being used in Hong Kong, though 9.2 million are connected to service plans. That means the total number of mobile subscriptions is 20.9 million, or almost three SIM cards per person.

Apparently many domestic helpers buy stacks of these pre-paid cards as they are on a budget, while travelers (when we had them) would buy them to use in Hong Kong.

Yau says phone scams use prepaid SIM cards

To add ammunition to getting all SIM card users registered, Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development Edward Yau Tang-wah said 90 percent of con artists used prepaid cards for deceptions, while 70 percent of offenders involved in serious crimes such as murder, robbery, burglary and drugs also relied on the cards.

"If we can eliminate these difficulties in detecting crime, actually the new measures do not affect law-abiding citizens but better protect their safety," he said, adding 155 countries had adopted similar regulations.

Does what he said sound familiar when the national security law came out, that it would only affect a small number of people?

However, what is amusing is that the consultation paper suggests each person can have a maximum of three SIM cards per telecom company, and with about 30 in the city, that means someone could have up to 90 SIM cards registered under their name...

Domestic helpers buy stacks of pre-paid cards

While it is understandable the authorities want to crack down on phone scams, with 615 reported in 2018 to 1,108 from January to November in 2020, victims have lost more than HK$563 million.

"The card has become a tool of the criminal," said security undersecretary Sonny Au Chi-kwong. "After committing crimes, they can keep getting a new one to avoid our detection. Without the culprits' identity, investigations became more difficult."

Will find out what happens after the one-month consultation is over, but it's pretty much expected this new regulation will be implemented...

More Victims of Online Scams

One woman gave away a mind boggling US$23 million to a "British engineer"

We are still reading more stories of people being duped from online romance scams.

The latest one this week was a 66-year-old widow who thought her boyfriend was a "British engineer" and needed money for his business. So she gave him HK$180 million! (US$23 million) in four years.

Like seriously? Why give anyone that much money -- and on top of that -- to someone you have NEVER MET IN PERSON?

In 2014 they met on the dating website Lovestruck

It's unbelievable that someone would even do something like that, but she has and now police are investigating.

She met the scam artist online on the online dating website Lovestruck in April 2014 and they apparently struck up a relationship.

"The fraudster claimed he had financial difficulties with his business, and asked the victim for money repeatedly between May 2014 and July this year," police said in a statement.

The victim is described as "wealthy" and is said to run a real estate investment company.

During the four-year period she deposited money into bank accounts in Hong Kong, mainland China, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, Britain, and Germany in more than 200 transactions.

Throughout the period the fraudster claimed he would pay her back as soon as the engineering project was finished.

90 percent of women are conned into giving away money

It was only after the widow spoke to her family about it did she realize she was duped.

The police report in the last two months, an average of one report per day was made to the authorities about online love scams. Most victims lost between hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions.

While some of the victims were aware of online scams through the news, they didn't think they themselves were being duped.

"They could not believe they had been scammed because they felt deep in the relationship and did not want to pull out," one source said. The scammers were very good at pretending to be "considerate".

Some skeptical people are starting to think these online romance scams are ways of laundering money, putting it in bank accounts around the world, but then why cry foul about it and get the police involved?

At the same time it's hard to understand why women -- 90 percent of the victims are females -- would be so easily scammed?

There will probably be another victim reported next week...

Beware the Robocall

Avoid robocalls in Mandarin that are scams to get your money

Up until recently there was a spate of victims who were scammed by robocalls in Hong Kong. When the phone rang and you picked it up, you would hear a click and then a prerecorded message in Mandarin.

It basically said the person had a package that had to be picked up at the post office and to press a number on the dial pad to speak to a live person. It would end up being someone acting like the authorities, saying the person had broken the law because their package contained illegal items or there were insufficient funds and money needed to be transferred.

Some people were duped into giving thousands, even millions of Hong Kong dollars. For the most part residents here have wised-up and we haven't heard of more scams, except for ones involving lonely hearts. But that's another issue.

The aforementioned robocalls have now invaded the United States, Canada and Australia, targeting new immigrants from China. However, the robocalls have affected anyone with a mobile number, which is virtually anyone.

This time the prerecorded message says the person has a package at the Chinese consulate that has been there for several days and needs to be picked up, and that they should press "1" to talk to a staff member about it.

If they do press "1" they talk to a live person who claims they need their identification information and credit card numbers to verify them, which inevitably leads to money being taken.

If you do receive these calls, hang up immediately, and even better, block them on your phone.

The authorities really need to stop these robocalls. Not only are they a nuisance but they are doing something criminal.

Love Does Not Equal Money

Scammers take advantage of lonely women in Hong Kong

Hong Kong has a lot of lonely women. Part of it is statistically there are more women than men (in 2016 there were 3.96 million women, 3.37 million men), and also men prefer women who are younger, or may go across the mainland to find their mate.

That leaves some women in Hong Kong desperate to find someone and con artists are taking advantage of these lonely souls.

There have been 119 women duped by online romance scammers out of HK$75.9 million (US$967,000) in the first three months of this year, five times the amount of the same period last year.

They con Hong Kong women out of millions of dollars

The latest victim? A woman in her 40s who works in a financial institution and was swindled out of HK$14 million in a so-called online romance that lasted eight years, the longest scam recorded so far.

She first "met" the man in August 2010 in an online dating profile, where he claimed to be a white male and a film director. After befriending her for three months, he started to ask her for money, claiming he was detained by Malaysian authorities for being caught carrying £300,000 in breach of the country's laws.

He began by asking her to transfer HK$10,000 and then used various excuses to get her to give him more money. In the end she made a staggering 200 to 300 transactions in amounts ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Throughout the eight years, she never met him in person.

It wasn't until the victim talked to her family about getting more money (she had already spent her savings and borrowed some) that she realized she was duped and called the police.

These shadowy figures can hardly be found again

Official police data shows 93 percent of the victims in the first quarter this year were women, almost 12 percent of them professionals. More than 80 percent of them were between the ages of 31 and 60.

How lonely and desperate do you have to be to willing to part with your money? It's very sad to hear of yet another case of a women being cheated out of her hard-earned money, but this only motivates scammers to continue to focus on women here.

It also shows how warped their sense of what love is -- that it is closely tied to money. Another observation is that so many of these scams have been reported in the media and yet these women don't wonder if their so-called relationships are real. Maybe it's denial...

Lonely Hearts Lose Money Too

Hong Kong people continue to lose money in online romance scams

It seems many Hong Kong women are suckers when it comes to love. They are desperate for companionship and are willing to pay dearly for it.

Last year 235 people were swindled out of HK$108 million, more than double the 114 cases in 2016 that involved HK$95 million. Most of the victims are women, and more than 40 percent of them are between the ages of 40 and 50.

One such case saw a middle-aged woman losing a whopping HK$6.1 million in the biggest online romance scam the city has seen.

The scam lasted over 18 months -- and that whole time she had never met the man who supposedly loved her.

One woman recently reported losing HK$6.1 million

Through Facebook she met a man who claimed to be a retired American businessman living in Malaysia. He even sent a photo of a Caucasian man in his 50s. They later kept in touch via Facebook messenger, emails and SMS messages.

"After gaining her trust, he claimed he had HK$100 million in assets that was frozen by the authorities in Malaysia because he had failed to pay legal and tax-related fees," a police source said. "He then sought her help to pay the fees with the promise of repayment once the assets could be transferred out of the country."

The scammer managed to convince her to transfer HK$6.1 million in more than 100 transactions into several bank accounts in Malaysia during the 18-month period.

Why do women fall for such Machiavellian tricks? And with so much news about online scams in the news, one would think victims would realize they are being duped?

But some are too embarrassed to admit this or in denial that it's happening to them.

It's a sad state of affairs really. The more desperate women there are, the more scammers will prey on them. It's too high a price to pay for "love".

Phishy Phone Business

Beware the phishy phone scams that aim to swindle money out of you

A friend recently told me about receiving a scam phone call, very similar to the other ones that managed to swindle more than HK$182 million since last month from gullible victims.

She said it was all role-playing, and remarked how they all acted very smoothly and each of the characters were interconnected.

At first, the supposed courier company representative got her to clarify her name and address in Putonghua and then claimed the parcel she had sent had fake documents.

Her call was then transferred to a supposed official who went over her details. Then, as if to talk to a nearby "colleague", he repeated her details to this other person, and she could overhear him saying she was suspected as part of a mainland investigation into a serious crime.

She was so shocked -- how could that be? To prove they had the right person, the man got her to disable her computer to click on a link to a website that would normally be considered phishy.

Soprano Li Yuanrong was cheated out of HK$20 million

It was then that they showed scanned coloured copies of her home return permit or hui heung jing which frightened her. How did they have it?

Even then she didn't think this was a scam.

At this point the man told her that there was a warrant issued for her arrest and she had to transfer money to resolve the case. They asked her if she had a bank account in China and she said no, but that she would have to transfer money into a China bank account. Otherwise they would come to Hong Kong and get her (since they had her address details).

It was then that they demanded her bank details and she refused to give it to them, but they kept repeating that the crime she was allegedly involved in was very serious and she had to resolve it otherwise they would come to get her.

Luckily at that same time my friend's boyfriend texted her to tell her this was a phone scam and not to give them anything.

She hung up the phone and they tried to call her again and she again refused.

A few days after they called early in the morning which annoyed her and she told them to piss off.

Later she realized that these scammers, whoever they are, probably got a copy of her home return permit card when she checked into a hotel in Beijing in June.

Someone in the hotel made some extra dough getting copies of hotel guests' details to these unscrupulous people who ran a pretty smooth operation.

All hotels in China take down your passport/ID details and make copies of them too -- there is no getting around this apparently regulation.

When will these scams end?! Luckily my friend was smart enough not to give away her bank details. She also thinks there are Hong Kong-based accomplices to get money from victims.

But as long as there are people who fall for this scam, the perpetrators will keep doing it...

Getting Duped on Call

Beware of mainland Chinese people calling to cheat you out of your money!

How did Hong Kong people get duped out of HK$85 million ($10.9 million) this month?

Apparently there are con artists posing as Chinese mainland officials from the Beijing liaison office, mainland Chinese police, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, banks or couriers.

They usually said they had broken mainland laws and were listed as wanted by the authorities. The victims -- 263 of them so far this month -- were told to prove their willingness to cooperate by transferring money to mainland bank accounts.

In the first 28 days of this month, another 466 similar fraud attempts were unsuccessful, making it a total of 729 telephone scams.

Lo Hung-mung says there were 263 victims this month

"It is three times [the number] of similar reports recorded in the first six months of this year, said Lo Mung-hung, director of crime and security.

The police say there were 200 cases involving HK$26.7 million in the first six months of this year, and only four such cases last year.

Obviously the number of scam calls has risen, and many more have taken the bait.

As a result, the Hong Kong authorities are setting up a task force led by the Kowloon East crime unit this month with mainland ones to share intelligence.

While Lo believes key figures in the scams are not in Hong Kong, he says their accomplices are in the city.

He added mainland police are also facing the same problem, with more than 10,000 cases reported in Guangdong province.

"Our lines of investigation will focus on telephone numbers culprits used to call and bank accounts where victims were asked to deposit money," he said.

Some calls showed the number of the liaison office in Western

Why reveal the investigation tactics so that the scammers will change them?!

Apparently when some scammers called, they used software that could fraudulently display the call number of the liaison office's main line, and so Lo said the police were working with the Communications Authority to try to end the practice.

How many other companies or individuals are using this same software to deceive others?

It would be interesting to hear what the conversation with the con artist was like, as it's hard to believe a Hong Kong person would be willing to help a stranger over the phone, let alone a mainlander, and a government official who was in trouble with the law.

I once received a strange phone call from someone who claimed to be my "uncle" in Guangzhou who called me out of the blue. By the way his number is +86 186 8046 2853.

Perhaps my chances of being tricked out of money is relatively slim as I answer the phone in English and many people hang up right away -- even telemarketers.

Never knew English was so scary.