Police: Phone scams in Jan-Feb tripled y-o-y

Three to four times more telephone scams have been recorded in the first two months of this year than the same period last year, Sit Chong Meng, director of the Judiciary Police (PJ), said over the weekend.

Sit made the disclosure on the sidelines of a crime mitigation event, at which he had announced in his speech that these crimes had soared in number during the said period, accounting to over MOP17.6 million in losses.

He described the scenario as “concerning and regrettable.”

In the first two months, 39 such scams have been recorded, in which 17 university students fell victims. Their total reported loss amounted to MOP2.5 million.

The police department head recapped the strategy of “Prevent, Retrieve, Strike”, saying that negotiations have been constant with various industries, particularly the banking sector, to address the crimes.

Referring to the payment suspension mechanism – co-introduced by the police and the banking sector – Sit said that it has become increasingly effective. Since its introduction in 2017, the mechanism has prevented the loss of MOP8 million in 46 fraud cases.

In addition, a suspicion remittance negotiation measure that was introduced in 2019 has so far prevented MOP12 million in losses across 80 cases. The measure relies on bank tellers advising customers to think twice when the latter requests remittances to non-Macau bank accounts.

A further step following this last is the prompt persuasion message. Sit explained that remittance over mobile app has become more popular but there is no bank teller on the app.

Therefore, the banking sector has induced prompt messages to the app. When a user tries to transfer MOP30,000 or more to non-Macau accounts, a prompt message will appear to remind the user about phone scams.

From October last year until now, the digital measure has been used on remittances amounts of MOP17 million.

Seminar sessions on scam mitigation have also been staged at local higher education institutions, Sit added.

Recently, data from the government showed that he Covid-19 pandemic and related border restrictions that kept Macau from the world caused a sharp decrease in crimes reported over the last three years and, particularly, in 2022 when the total number of crimes reported dropped some 13.9%.

During the pandemic and when border restrictions were in force, the crime figures were lower than in 2019 when it reached 14,178 in total.