Scammers launder nearly HK$29 billion from victims through Hong Kong bank accounts, cryptocurrency wallets over past 4½ years
- Police force’s anti-fraud squad says it has intercepted 31 per cent of crime proceeds since its launch in July 2017
- Online romance scams, commercial email fraud and phone swindles among wide range of deception schemes
Swindlers laundered nearly HK$29 billion (US$3.72 billion) conned from more than 10,100 victims of internet, phone and investment scams in Hong Kong and abroad through local bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallets over the past 4½ years, police figures have shown.
Police said they had intercepted 31 per cent of crime proceeds, or about HK$9 billion, since the anti-fraud squad was set up in July 2017 to track down funds and uncover new tactics used by swindlers. International fraudsters pocketed the remaining HK$19.94 billion.
The remaining funds were equivalent to nearly one-third of the HK$64.4 billion in estimated government revenue collected from salaries tax in the 2021-22 financial year.
Last year saw the lowest amount of scammed money intercepted by the Anti-Deception Coordination Centre over the past three years.
Between January and November last year, the squad received 3,454 requests from victims in Hong Kong and overseas to stop payments totalling HK$6.82 billion in defrauded money. Officers intercepted HK$1.48 billion or 21 per cent of funds conned by scammers.
By comparison, anti-fraud officers handled 2,594 stop-payment requests involving HK$8.33 billion in 2020, of which they intercepted HK$3.07 billion or 37 per cent. There were 1,913 requests involving HK$7.23 billion in 2019, with police stopping HK$3.03 billion or 42 per cent of the money.
In 2018, the centre received 1,686 requests to stop a total of HK$5.35 billion, with officers recovering 23 per cent of the money. Between July and December of 2017, they handled 516 requests to stop the payments of HK$1.21 billion and intercepted 18 per cent of the crime proceeds.