Scam calls may be marked with warnings or blocked as authorities and phone service providers work on countering crooks.
That word came from Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung yesterday as he revealed experts are studying anti-scam technology.
Most scam calls are from the mainland, Tang said at a Legislative Council meeting, and telecom companies currently mark non-Hong Kong numbers with a "+" sign to help users spot them.
The Office of the Communications Authority said phone service providers have since August 2015 had to display the plus sign before a caller ID for all incoming calls originating outside Hong Kong.
New People's Party legislator Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, secretary for security from 1998 to 2003, noted that calls from numbers with the plus sign could be prefaced with a short voice recording advising people to beware of scams - "similar to how calls to the bank come with a warning not to disclose personal details."
But scammers can get around such countermeasures through "caller ID spoofing" - a practice in which crooks attempt to disguise or falsify their identities and locations by manipulating the number displayed as the caller ID.
Scammers are typically able to conduct a caller ID spoof by using a voice over internet protocol, said Francis Fong Po-kiu, honorary president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation. This enables scammers to make calls from what appears to be a number in Hong Kong.
"Scammers can use a VoIP - a service that allows communication over the internet rather than a cellular connection - to change their caller ID manually," he explained. Scammers utilizing VoIP connections can also change their caller number and name to pose as someone calling from a bank or other business.
Tang said service providers are investigating how to identify phone numbers linked to scammers to block calls from them, while officers will also "patrol" online to seek suspicious websites.
But inaccuracies are not uncommon.
As numbers are stored in a user-generated database, Fong said, calls could be flagged by carriers if they match a number in a database of known scam numbers.
The system proposed by Tang, he said, could end up inadvertently blocking legitimate callers as scammers. So in-depth investigations will be needed.
"Authorities will also have to reach out to platforms such as Meta and Google to facilitate a crackdown on scammers," Fong said, adding that some crooks might take advantage of precarious financial situations like stock market crashes to conduct scams.
A rising number of Hongkongers have been conned in recent years, with fraud cases increasing to 19,249 in 2021 from 8,372 in 2018. And police logged 19,444 cases in the first nine months of this year, with victims losing about HK$3.3 billion.
Tang added that more than 70 percent of this year's cases involved online scams, with 45 percent of them shopping ripoffs.
He said the force's Anti-Deception Coordination Center has prevented more than 400 people from getting conned out of HK$1 billion and multiple fraud rings have been dismantled with over 650 arrests.
Police said this month that people can look up names and phone numbers they deem suspicious on a new search engine based on around 20,000 entries of suspicious activities online or call behavior.
cjames.lee@singtaonewscorp.com
