Is this your destiny calling?

PEOPLE US MOBILE phones to chat, 'text' messages, check e-mails and take snaps. Recently I discovered Hong Kong's favoured communication tool is also used to tell fortunes. Working from a Sheung Wan office-apartment, 37-year-old soothsayer Eva Koo Man-hei takes mobile-phone numbers as prognosticators of clients' lives. The mother-of-two has become so famous for her 'talent' that for the past two years she has made a living as a self-styled oracle.

'Everyone's fate is related to numbers - your birthday and time are all numbers,' she says. 'A mobile number follows you all the time, so it interacts with your five elements [earth, fire, metal, wood and water] and affects your fate.'

A number apparently affects and reflects one's fortune and character. The longer a person uses the number, the more pronounced the effect. Koo, who charges $160 for a number reading and $480 for advice on a lucky number, claims she has helped businessmen clinch deals and women attract romance.

While certain patterns of numbers are 'lucky', individual ones are supposedly also auspicious. According to Koo, who also claims she can tell people's fortunes from, among other things, their ID card and student card numbers, three brings fortune to middle-aged men, four is lucky for working women, and one is good for love and intelligence. Koo adds she can tell from a phone number whether its owner is gay or whether the spouse is having an affair. Her accuracy rate is '90 per cent', she says.

Koo, who graduated from secondary five, worked as a clerk in a trading company before a friend helped launch her divining career by securing a 'seers' column for her on the Tom.com Web site. Her fame - some would say infamy - was also boosted by her appearance last January on a night-time ghost stories programme on Metro Radio, which she accepted without payment, but which earned her publicity. On the programme, she predicted the fortunes of members of the audience, via their mobile phone numbers. Now, apart from businessmen, Koo can count among her customers office workers, lawyers, accountants, IT executives, mo-vie stars, film directors ... and me.

I visit Koo along with a reporter from a local teen magazine, who brings with her two students as guinea pigs. Dressed in a red jumper, black trousers, her wavy hair a tad unkempt, she does not exactly fit my image of a fortune-teller, but I try to keep an open mind.