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Amy Nip

A warning has gone out to men tempted to take off their clothes or perform indecent acts during erotic online video chat sessions: think twice.
The number of blackmail cases resulting from such sessions, in which the participants view each other through webcams, has risen more than six-fold in the first half of this year, police say.
And none of the blackmailers, mostly Asian women, have been caught because they live outside Hong Kong.
"The male victims are prompted to take off their clothes and do indecent acts," police director of crime and security Lo Wai-chung said.
Then the women would tell their chat partners that they had taken a picture or video of them and would post the images on Facebook unless they paid the sums demanded.
The women had asked for amounts ranging from HK$500 to HK$150,000 to be transferred to bank accounts in various Asian countries.
In the first six months of this year there were 131 such cases, up from 20 in the same period last year, police said.
At the same time the number of blackmail cases overall rose from 154 to 250.
Indecent chats aside, police also warned people to be careful when making friends on the internet or through mobile phone applications such as WeChat and Skout.
Crimes involving the use of social media more than doubled to 109 in the first half of the year, compared with 44 in the same period last year.
Criminals usually deceived their new "friends" in two ways, Lo said.
They lie about a family member being ill or suffering a business failure and needing money, or they rob their "friends" of their phones and wallets at arranged meetings.
Twenty-four people were arrested for such crimes in the first six months of the year.
The increase in internet scams pushed the number of deception cases up 10 per cent year-on-year to 3,585.
Apart from individuals, small and medium-sized enterprises were also targeted.
"Syndicates targeted SMEs as their computer systems are less well-protected and easier to hack," Lo said. In some cases, they pretended to be business partners of companies, tricking them into paying money to the wrong people.
"They claimed they had changed their bank accounts. Without making calls to reconfirm, victims have transferred as much as several million dollars to the deceivers," he said.
There were 511 cases of e-mail scams at the corporate level, representing a two-fold increase compared with the same period last year.
The amount of losses went up from HK$64 million to more than HK$310 million.
Also in the first six months, the amount of Ecstasy seized by the police jumped more than 10 times from a year ago to 430 tablets.
The seizures of methamphetamine, usually referred to as Ice, also quadrupled to 80kg.
Lo said the city was quick to clarify that Hong Kong was not becoming a distribution or manufacturing centre of drugs, but was merely a transit point used by some syndicates.
All in all, the number of crimes had dropped four per cent to 36,068 in the first half of this year, he said.
 


Blackmail warning to Hong Kong men over video sex chats 

Indecent chats aside, police also warned people to be careful when making friends on the internet or through mobile phone applications such as WeChat and Skout. Photo: Paul Yeung

News

Hong Kong

Women at the other end of the webcam have been raking in money by threatening to post the images on social media, say police


Blackmail warning to Hong Kong men over video sex chats

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Women at the other end of the webcam have been raking in money by threatening to post the images on social media, say police

Women at the other end of the webcam have been raking in money by threatening to post the images on social media, say police