The director of the Judiciary Police (PJ), Sit Chong Meng, revealed yesterday in a press conference that scams using phishing sites to collect credit card data topped the list of cybercrimes growing more in 2024.
The information was revealed during a presentation of the results of the force’s work last year.
Addressing the topic, Sit noted that “last year, there were 689 cases related to this type of crime, an increase of 1.1 times [when compared to 2023], which caused losses of over 14 million patacas to companies and the population. This is the type of cybercrime that saw the biggest growth last year,” adding that “fraudsters have been illegally using [new] messages and [a large variety of] phishing websites to steal credit card data, luring the public with [advertisings] of novelties [new things or products], which has made prevention difficult.”
He noted that despite advancements in controlling and fighting cybercrime on different fronts, phishing is far from being controlled, adding that only more awareness and better knowledge from the population of this type of crime can produce better results.
The PJ director noted that the force increased its online and in-person anti-fraud awareness campaigns.
The Force organized some 697 information sessions on fraud last year, which gathered 120,000 participants. Additionally, 1,600 posts were published online on the same topic.
Additionally, to prevent scams among young adults, the PJ organized special sessions dedicated to university students titled “Anti-fraud vaccination program on campus” to consolidate student awareness.
According to the PJ, the anti-fraud tools made available by the PJ have been used for over 23,000 searches at the “fraud search” function. As the Times previously reported, this interactive tool allows people to search for particular messages and content received, running it into a database from known scams from PJ or even reporting them as new ones.
Students targeted with scams as a way to reach their parents
Questioned by media representatives and other guests on the topic, the Judiciary Police (PJ) director, Sit Chong Meng, further explained that university students are often targets of several types of scams as a way to reach their parents.
“We know that fraudsters constantly attempt to target students as a way to reach their parents as they believe they are wealthy people, and so they can profit highly from them,” Sit said, advancing that this applies to both the university students from the mainland that are studying in local institutions as well as local students, from senior high school level that follow “luring leads” online mainly related with opportunities to study abroad.
The same official noted that there are cases in which scammers even submitted letters to the students or families claiming that the students have been accepted by a reputable university abroad, calling for deposits of 1 or 2 million patacas to prove the family’s capacity to pay for the student’s tuition.
The PJ director said the force is trying to alert parents to this type of case to tackle this problem.
“This usually happens with outstanding students with good marks and exceptional school performance, so parents do not suspect something is wrong in this approach,” Sit noted.
Citing the figures, the same official noted that in 2023, around 30% of the victims of cybercrimes in Macau were students (over 800 cases). This figure continues to grow (over 900 cases in 2024), significantly increasing the amounts reportedly lost.
According to Sit, 44 million patacas were lost to this kind of scam in 2023, and the sum increased to 68 million patacas last year, an increase of 54.5%.
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