A rich 90-year-old woman from Hong Kong was defeated by $ 32 million in alleged Chinese authorities – in the largest telephone scam in the region, according to reports.
The woman – who lives in a mansion in the elegant neighborhood known as The Peak – was targeted last summer by fraudsters who claimed to be public security officials, the South China Morning Post reported.
“She was told that her identity was used in a serious criminal case in mainland China,” a police source told reporters. “She was then instructed to transfer her money to designated bank accounts to investigate whether the money was the result of the crime.”
The source added that the victim “was promised that all the money will be returned after the investigation.”
A 19-year-old student allegedly went to the woman’s house and gave her a mobile phone to communicate with the con artist, the source told Morning Post.
As instructed, she transferred the huge amount through 11 transactions in three accounts between August 2020 and January 2021, police said.
One of the crooks also accompanied the woman to a bank to do one of the transactions.
Police said the scam was detected after the victim’s internal nurse thought something suspicious was happening and contacted her employer’s daughter, who alerted police, Agence France-Presse reported.
Officers at 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 the phone scammers did the rest.
Hong Kong has one of the largest concentrations of billionaires in the world, many of them elderly, making them vulnerable to such scams.
Reports of phone scams rose 18 percent in the first quarter of 2021, and fraud pocketed about $ 45 million during that period, AFP reported.
Last year, a 65-year-old woman was cheated out of 10 million dollars according to a similar scheme in which people positioned themselves as continental security officials, according to the news agency.