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Hong Kong police are expanding the functions of the Scameter app to cover suspicious social media content, as online employment and investment ploys have continued to surge despite a marginal overall increase in scam cases. Keith Yip Wan-lung, deputy police commissioner for operations, said scammers were changing tactics to capitalise on the latest trends and events, with criminals now favouring social media platforms as the best way to reach victims. “Scammers design their traps with clear targets in mind. Especially when technology develops rapidly nowadays, they favour online media and scams on these platforms even more,” he said. Police received 32,142 scam reports in the first nine months of 2025, a 0.1 per cent rise from the 32,120 cases logged in the same period last year. The amount lost between January and September stood at HK$5.64 billion (US$726 million), a 12 per cent decrease from the HK$6.41 billion recorded for the first nine months of last year. Yip revealed that the force was able to freeze 27.6 per cent more scam proceeds, with officers blocking HK$1.57 billion of such funds in 1,124 cases over the nine-month period. Police also arrested 4,552 people for offences related to scams and money laundering between January and September. The figures showed instant messaging hijacks, phishing and phone scams had declined year on year. Phishing scams recorded the biggest drop, at 51.2 per cent, falling from 1,856 cases to 906. Messaging account hijacks, where scammers take over a user account and message existing contacts to swindle money, declined by 47.2 per cent to 1,394 cases, while phone scams dropped by 9.7 per cent to 5,737 cases. But the data also indicated that online shopping, employment and investment scams were on the rise. Online employment scams showed the largest increase among the three categories, rising by 40.3 per cent year on year to 3,566 cases. Online investment scams followed with a 31.9 per cent increase to 3,709 cases, while online shopping scams showed a 13.8 per cent rise to 9,569 cases. Yip said bogus concert ticket sales, “click farming” swindles under the guise of quick cash, and stock investment scams were the most popular cases among the three types of online scams on the rise. Chief Superintendent Raymond Lam Cheuk-ho of the force’s cybersecurity and technology crime bureau, meanwhile, said the Scameter database and reporting platform would have expanded functions and receive new artificial intelligence-powered upgrades by the end of October. The upgraded version allows users to report suspicious messages by sharing screenshots to the app, meaning they could flag suspicious activity on instant messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Telegram. The previous version only allowed users to report suspicious phone numbers and web links. The Scameter app is also able to update its database automatically when running in the background on users’ phones, instantly integrate residents’ reports into its database and generate up-to-date rankings of the most popular swindling scenarios. These changes are enabled by the use of various AI-based technologies, such as “agentic AI” that can produce a single result from simultaneous analyses of multiple items, computer vision to instantly tell fake websites from the real ones, and natural language processing to analyse sham web pages. Besides arrest operations and upgrading their own database, police have also ramped up collaboration with other regulators to bolster defences against fraudsters and their evolving tactics. Raymond Chan King-wang, executive director for enforcement and anti-money-laundering at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), said the city’s de facto central bank was in the process of updating a bank-to-bank information sharing platform. The update would allow the platform, which is currently used by 10 retail banks in the city, to enable sharing personal account information to detect scams and money laundering, he said. “Our plan is to have all 28 retail banks in Hong Kong join the information sharing platform, and that will cover more than 90 per cent of all bank accounts in Hong Kong,” Chan added. The HKMA and police have already managed to stop 80 residents from conducting further high-risk transactions over the past six months. Chan also said that police had tipped off banks about these 80 residents sending money to suspicious accounts, enabling bank employees to request the account holders to visit a bank branch if they wished to proceed with any such transactions. “These people come from all walks of life, it’s not just the elderly,” he said. “The main type of scam tactic involved is a combination of romance scam and investment scam.”
