Chow Yat-ming said he hoped to change the law to address the use of phone cards in scams. Police recorded nearly 10,000 phone scams and HK$1.94 billion in losses in the first nine months of 2026.
He gave the figures at a Southern District Council meeting on November 2, where he also reported 68,015 crimes across Hong Kong in the first nine months of the year, up 2.1% from the same period in 2025.
Chow said people were obtaining phone cards from shops, registering them online under their real names and then handing them to scam groups. He said renting or selling cards was not an offence, and someone arrested as the registered user could argue they did not know the card was being used for fraud. Under the current registration arrangement he described, each person could register up to 10 cards with each of 31 telecom companies—potentially 310 cards in all.
More than 3,900 phone scams were recorded in August and September, Chow said, with 80% involving callers impersonating customer-service staff.
Chow described a separate rise in scams using internet-telephony services: the share of scams involving these services increased from about 10% previously to 30% in August and September. He said calls using these numbers do not display “+852”, wherever they originate, which can make them appear to be local calls. Police had asked telecom companies to deactivate the numbers concerned.