A rich 90-year-old woman in Hong Kong was reportedly caught for $ 32 million by criminals posing as Chinese authorities, the region’s biggest phone scam.
The woman, who lives in a mansion in the cheeky neighborhood of The Peak, was targeted last summer by scammers who claimed to be public safety officers, the South China Morning Post reported.
“He was told that his identity was being used in a serious criminal case in mainland China,” a police source told the source. “He was then instructed to transfer his money to designated bank accounts to investigate whether the money came from the crime.”
The source added that “the victim was promised that all the money would be returned to him after the investigation.”
A 19-year-old college student allegedly went to the woman’s home and gave her a cell phone to communicate with the artist, the source told the Morning Post.
According to the instructions, he transferred the huge amount through 11 transactions to three accounts between August 2020 and January 2021, police reported to the dam.
One of the scammers also accompanied the woman to a bank to do one of the transactions.
Police said the scam was detected after the victim’s domestic helper believed there was something suspicious and contacted the daughter of her employer, who alerted police, the report said. ‘France-Presse Agency.
Officers from the Kowloon East regional crime unit arrested the 19-year-old last month and froze bank accounts worth more than $ 1 million, according to the South China Morning Post.
But phone scammers have come out with the rest.
Hong Kong has one of the highest concentrations of billionaires in the world, many of them elderly, making them vulnerable to these scams.
Reports of phone scams rose 18 percent in the first quarter of 2021, and scammers pocketed about $ 45 million during the period, AFP reported.
Last year, a 65-year-old woman was tricked into the $ 10 million after a similar scheme in which people became continental security officials, according to the news agency.