A local woman was cheated out of HK$4.96 million last year in a phone scam, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Chong Kam Leong said at a press briefing yesterday.
According to Chong, the 45-year-old woman reported to the Judiciary Police on Monday that she received a call on her smartphone on September 29 last year from someone who claimed to be a “bank staff”, asking her whether she had spent 17,000 yuan in Beijing. The woman denied it and the “bank staff” then transferred the call to a “Public Security Bureau (PSB) officer” in Beijing who claimed that she was suspected of involvement in money laundering activities in the mainland, and that all her bank accounts would be “frozen” soon unless she could provide him all her bank accounts details and a one-time pin to assist in the “investigation”.
Chong said that last October, the victim received a document outside her office building from a woman. The document, which contained the victim’s personal data, was about the purported investigation of her “case” from the mainland’s “Prosecutions Office”. Someone then told her by phone to transfer HK$3.28 million and HK$1.68 million from four local bank accounts to one of her accounts together with a one-time password, asking her not to check her account during the “investigation”. The victim finally realised that she had been cheated after talking to a friend and reported the case to the police on Monday. The Judiciary Police later confirmed that all the money in her bank account had vanished.
