Hong Kong Phone Scams

10 Jan

Despite all the publicity and media reports on such scams, there’s still plentiful of such scams going on. They always go by the same sequence or with some differences for the sake of variety. First, you received a telephone call from an unknown number from a China-accented person to do a survey by some company. After that, you will receive another call a few days later that you are being invited to an event in some convention centre. On that day or the day after, the same person will call and inform you that you have won a prize in a lucky draw that you won’t even know that you are in it. I think that part is sort of to have you think that you joined the lucky draw because of the survey. So, you have won something but to collect it, you will have to pay a percentage of the money as tax/trust insurance/administration fee or whatever they call it in order to collect your prize money. Apparently, there’s no lack of idiots in this world, people still fall for such scams due to their greed.

I received such a call last year but brushed it off. But a few days ago, I got another such call. This time, I decided to play along and do a bit of detective work. I questioned the lady why I should pay the tax to the Hong Kong government when I am a Singaporean. I don’t even think that there’s a tax on lottery or lucky draw winnings in Singapore or Hong Kong. I managed to get a phone number and a website address from the lady. That’s where things starts falling apart for her, the website redirects to a company of the same name but does mortgages instead of the electronics like the scammer told me. Furthermore, the web address is only registered in November 2007 (There’s what you get when you are dealing with an IT savvy person). Anyway, I am still considering if I should report this to the Police at the moment. So stay tuned to my detective work.

For more details on such scams, head over to KennySia.com, he scored one over the scammers.

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