All unauthorized transactions canceled after 1,700 fraud reports on new iPhones

All unauthorized transactions tied to purchases of Apple's new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo have been canceled, with no victims suffering financial losses across more than 1,700 reports, Commissioner of Police Joe Chow Yat-ming said Monday.

Speaking at a Southern District Council meeting reviewing the city's latest crime trends, Chow provided an update on the cases, revealing that police had received 1,589 reports of unauthorized credit card charges involving the iPhone 18 Pro and another 138 linked to the iPhone Duo.

Following coordination among police, Apple, credit card companies, and local banks, Chow confirmed that all compromised transactions were reversed and that cardholders incurred no financial loss.

He urged Apple to introduce more robust security and identity verification measures during future product launches to prevent similar abuses.

Addressing overall crime figures, Chow said Hong Kong recorded a 2.1 percent year-on-year increase, reaching approximately 68,000 cases in the first three quarters of the year.

The uptick occurred despite declines across most major crime categories, driven primarily by surges in indecent assault, fraud, and youth crime.

Fraud alone accounted for more than half of all reported offenses, exceeding 34,000 cases with total losses climbing to HK$6.2 billion.

Phone scams surpassed online shopping fraud as the leading concern, making up nearly 30 percent of all fraud cases and causing HK$1.94 billion in losses.

Based on police forensic analyses of victim call records, Chow noted that the vast majority of scammers placed calls from local numbers, with several cases tracing back to SIM cards purchased at retail outlets.

Because renting or reselling SIM cards is not currently prohibited under Hong Kong law, retail vendors can claim ignorance of fraudulent use upon arrest, Chow explained, urging legislative amendments to close the statutory loophole.

He added that fraud syndicates have also increasingly exploited vulnerabilities in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, with VoIP-enabled scam calls jumping from roughly 10 percent of cases in August to 30 percent in September.

Because VoIP calls can bypass the "+852" caller-ID warning prefix, many recipients mistook them for legitimate local calls, Chow said. 

He added that police have instructed telecommunications operators to suspend suspicious numbers and have shared detection guidelines to help carriers identify illicit activity.

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