“Unknown Caller”
We all get them, calls about extending our car warranty, or winning a free trip to somewhere, or the more onerous ones about a relative who is being detained or that someone has been using your social security number. Scammers are alive and well and don’t care about the US ‘Do Not Call List’, particularly as most are off shore and are likely either paying off local authorities to look the other way, or know that there is little any legal organization is going to do because the sums are relatively small. Well, a new record was set in Hong Kong, where the number of mobile phone fraud cases increased from 648 in 2019 to 1,193 last year, an infinitesimal number compared to the 2.1m ‘fraud incidences’ reported to the FTC last year in the US, with about $3.3b in losses, although not all of these were from phone scams. (On-line shopping scams were the largest overall).
An elderly woman living in a residence on the very exclusive ‘Peak’ in Hong Kong, (Christie’s has 19 homes for sale there, with the cheapest a mere $8.2m and the most expensive ~$451m) was contacted by a self-proclaimed government official who stated that she had been involved in a serious case of money laundering on the Mainland. The scammer went as far as to send someone to the woman’s address to give her a ‘special’ mobile phone for her to use concerning the investigation. The woman was instructed to send HK$7.9m, roughly $1m US to a particular account so it could be examined to see if it had been involved in the money laundering, which she did. That was followed by an additional request for a total of HK$2509m ($32.2m US) and the scammer even had the woman’s personal driver bring him and her to the bank together so she could make the transfer.
The woman’s helper was smart enough to call her daughter to report the suspicious transactions who asked relatives to go to the bank to monitor the transaction, however they did not follow up on the issue and the transfers continued until the entire HK$250m had been transferred to the scammers account over a few weeks. Eventually the daughter followed up and was able to freeze what was left in the scammer’s account, about HK$9m ($1.16m US) and police arrested a 19 year old university student. Of course this is an unusual extreme (and a new record), but it happens all the time. There are a few phone tools that can help and a recent FCC ruling makes it easier for carriers to filter out the more obvious scams, but the best way to avoid being scammed is by not answering calls from numbers you do not know. If they don’t leave a message, it wasn’t important, and if it is an odd sounding one, don’t call back, just call the institution represented to verify the call was real, rarely if ever government agencies call on the phone….
An elderly woman living in a residence on the very exclusive ‘Peak’ in Hong Kong, (Christie’s has 19 homes for sale there, with the cheapest a mere $8.2m and the most expensive ~$451m) was contacted by a self-proclaimed government official who stated that she had been involved in a serious case of money laundering on the Mainland. The scammer went as far as to send someone to the woman’s address to give her a ‘special’ mobile phone for her to use concerning the investigation. The woman was instructed to send HK$7.9m, roughly $1m US to a particular account so it could be examined to see if it had been involved in the money laundering, which she did. That was followed by an additional request for a total of HK$2509m ($32.2m US) and the scammer even had the woman’s personal driver bring him and her to the bank together so she could make the transfer.
The woman’s helper was smart enough to call her daughter to report the suspicious transactions who asked relatives to go to the bank to monitor the transaction, however they did not follow up on the issue and the transfers continued until the entire HK$250m had been transferred to the scammers account over a few weeks. Eventually the daughter followed up and was able to freeze what was left in the scammer’s account, about HK$9m ($1.16m US) and police arrested a 19 year old university student. Of course this is an unusual extreme (and a new record), but it happens all the time. There are a few phone tools that can help and a recent FCC ruling makes it easier for carriers to filter out the more obvious scams, but the best way to avoid being scammed is by not answering calls from numbers you do not know. If they don’t leave a message, it wasn’t important, and if it is an odd sounding one, don’t call back, just call the institution represented to verify the call was real, rarely if ever government agencies call on the phone….
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