Hong Kong police have warned residents about scammers posing as customers on the popular online retail platform Carousell, with 644 cases involving HK$36 million (US$4.63 million) in losses recorded in the first 10 months of the year.
Chief Inspector Felton Leung Yee-tak of the cybersecurity and technology crime bureau said on Monday that losses from online shopping scams between January and October were more than double the amount recorded during the same period last year.
Scammers were increasingly using fake payment records to obtain bank account details of individual sellers on e-commerce platforms such as Carousell, which often increased the size of the losses, he said.
“In these types of cases, scammers weren’t targeting particular types of goods, but rather the victim’s log-in information for online banking services and savings,” Leung said. “Therefore, the losses incurred would be more serious, deserving greater attention.”
The number of online shopping scams rose amid a slight drop in overall technology crime cases, which span various types of online scams, sextortion, phishing scams and account theft.
The city logged 28,433 cases of technology crimes in the first 10 months, down by 2.2 per cent from the same period last year, with losses falling by HK$210 million.
