Some Chinese phone scam victims may get money back after police seize Ұ1.4b from gangs
Authorities call for patience because the number of victims and amounts of money are huge and will require some time to sort out
Some victims of phone scams are set to get their money back after mainland police seized more than a billion yuan in illicit funds during a crackdown on thousands of fraud syndicates.
On Wednesday, Beijing police returned a total of more than 5.8 million yuan (HK$6.9 million) to 15 people who had been defrauded, according to the Ministry of Public Security.
The 15 are among the first batch of several hundred people to get more than 100 million yuan in total.
Nationwide, police confiscated more than 1.4 billion yuan, of which 1 billion yuan came from 350,000 bank accounts frozen by Beijing police.
“As both the amount of money and the number of victims involved is huge, it will take a lot of time for police to verify their identities,” Xinhua quoted Zang Xuemin, deputy team leader of administration of the Beijing Public Security Bureau, as saying.
“We hope the victims can be patient. We will return their money once we can confirm to whom it belongs.”
The return of funds to some victims is rare because mainland law stipulates that phone scam victims cannot recover their money before legal proceedings have been completed.
Hongkongers are also among those cheated out of millions of dollars by phone scammers with networks that in some cases cross international borders. But officials previously said it was difficult to recover the money because of complex cross-border transfers.
If any Hong Kong victims are involved, chances could be higher that they will get their money back
Hong Kong legislator Ben Chan Han-pan said he would check with the bureau to see if any funds could flow to Hong Kong victims. “If any Hong Kong victims are involved, chances could be higher that they will get their money back as the records should be more traceable,” Chan said.
Beijing police late last year established a centre with various financial institutions, including Bank of China, to monitor suspicious money transfers and freeze bank accounts used by alleged fraudsters. Previously, police had to make official requests to banks to freeze the accounts.
A vast majority of the money seized in the national crackdown was confiscated while it was still sitting in bank accounts, according to the police. Once the money was withdrawn, it was much more difficult to trace, authorities said.
Representatives from the central bank, the banking regulator as well as several major commercial lenders also attended a ceremony on Wednesday as part of the cash handover.
In Beijing, the number of phone scams carried out by overseas-basedsyndicates in the first four months of this year shrank by 40 per cent from a year earlier, while total economic losses plunged by 64 per cent. About 20,000 suspects from 2,900 phone scam gangs have been detained so far in a nationwide investigation of more than 44,000 cases.
