From the 1st to the 10th of this month, the police detected a total of 74 deception cases, involving 104 million yuan, and arrested 107 people.
In one of the online dating and investment fraud cases, the female victim lost as much as 27 million yuan, which is the single case with the largest loss since January last year.
The police stated that most of the arrested persons were puppet account holders. They reminded that any act of renting out or lending accounts for others to use is illegal, and appealed to the public not to risk their lives for "quick money".
Senior Inspector Liu Zhenyu of the Kowloon East Regional Technology Crime Unit said that in a case involving a loss of 27 million yuan, the female victim was an accountant. She met a scammer on a social platform in May last year and developed into a couple. investment opportunity” and assisted her to open an account on a fake investment platform, requiring the victim to deposit money into the account for investment. Most of the receiving accounts are held by different people, and investment records will appear on the fake investment platform, hoping to make the victim sincere Trust that their money is guaranteed to be an investment.
At the same time, scammers will use the high investment risk as an excuse to encourage the victim to withdraw funds as soon as possible, but the customer service personnel of the "investment platform" will use the excuse of paying taxes and charging handling fees to require the victim to pay additional fees before getting back the principal.
After paying the money according to the instructions, the victim still failed to get back the money, so he suspected of being cheated and reported the case in January this year.
During this period, she has transferred as much as 27 million yuan to 43 accounts in 97 times, including the owner's savings, second mortgage properties, and even loans from friends or financial companies.
The police arrested 15 people in this case, most of them were puppet account holders.
According to the police, 74 cases of deception were detected in the "Fighting Tiger" operation, the largest one involving 27 million yuan.
(Photo by Chen Haoran)
Chief Inspector Xu Nuo of the Third Team of the Serious Crime Unit of East Kowloon Region pointed out that there were 25,160 fraud cases in the first 11 months of last year, 45% higher than the same period in 2021, and the total loss was as high as 4.2 billion yuan, which is quite worrying.
East Kowloon Regional Criminal Headquarters, together with the four major police districts in East Kowloon, carried out an anti-technology crime and fraud operation code-named "Battle Tiger" from the 1st to the 10th of this month, and detected 74 fraud cases, including online shopping, online investment, online A total of 104 million Hong Kong dollars were involved in love, job hunting and telephone fraud cases, and the police also froze 3.8 million yuan of criminal proceeds.
During the operation, the police arrested 81 men and 26 women (aged 18 to 75) for the crimes of "obtaining property by deception", "fraud" and "money laundering". Some of them have triad backgrounds.
Among them, 104 are puppet account holders who provided their accounts for the laundering of criminal proceeds. The police will analyze the flow of funds and continue to investigate how many fraud syndicates are involved in the case; Receive fraudulent money.
Liu Zhenyu added that about 5% of those arrested were students.
Xu Nuo said that he believed that the crimes committed by the arrested persons were related to the new crown epidemic or economic reasons, and pointed out that many arrested persons saw advertisements for "quick money" on online social platforms, lending their accounts in exchange for thousands of dollars in rewards.
She reminded that any act of renting out or lending accounts for others to use is illegal, and urged the public not to try their best.
The police reminded that assisting a fraudulent group or being involved in related activities is a serious crime, and appealed to the public not to defy the law.
(Photo by Chen Haoran)
The 74 cases detected this time involved a total of 51 males and 77 female victims, aged between 19 and 88.
Kowloon East Regional Crime Prevention Office Senior Inspector Wong Chung-ya said that most scammers contact victims through social media.
She reminded the public to carefully verify the identity of the other party when using social media. If in doubt, they can make a video call with the other party, and should not disclose sensitive personal information and bank account information to strangers on social media.
The police also appealed to the public not to download apps from unknown sources; they should be more careful if money transactions are involved. If they are asked to transfer funds to different accounts, and the name of the account holder is different from the name of a netizen or company they know, it is very likely It's a scam.
The police have released an "anti-fraud video device". Citizens can enter suspicious platform account names or numbers, receiving accounts, phone numbers, power saving or IP addresses, and website addresses to assess network security risks. They can also call Anti-Fraud Easy Hotline 18222 for inquiries.
A female accountant fell into an online dating scam, was tricked into mortgages and borrowed money to invest in foreign currency, and lost $27 million in online love｜The investment manager mistakenly believed in a cryptocurrency expert and was hit by a $12.8 million heritage. Police anti-fraud broke 37 cases in a week and arrested 43 people involved in online love and 12 million yuan defrauded by the bouncing party