Taiwanese WhatsApp scam costs Hongkongers tens of thousands of dollars
Gang hijacked victims’ WhatsApp accounts and asked their friends to transfer money or points cards for online games
A gang of Taiwanese con artists is suspected to have been behind a new scam where WhatsApp users in Hong Kong had their accounts hijacked and people on their contact lists were deceived, prompting local police to seek help from overseas law enforcers.
The Post understands that the scam first came to the attention of police in November and more than 60 people have been duped out of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past three months.
Only a single-digit number of cases were recorded in November, involving losses of more than HK$10,000 (US$1,280), but rose to more than 30 reports in December when scammers bagged about HK$200,000 (US$25,570), the Post learned. A similar number of cases and amount of losses were recorded last month.
Investigations indicated swindlers pretended to be friends of WhatsApp users and lured them into revealing their account’s verification codes before sending messages to people on their contact lists, according to police.
Officers believe fraudsters first gathered information such as phone numbers through their targets’ Facebook accounts or other online social media.
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Con artists posing as the targets’ friends claimed their WhatsApp accounts were disabled and had to be set up again and their mobile phones were also broken. The account’s verification code would be sent to the mobile phones of the targets who are then instructed to send the code to their “friends”.