Hong KongIn Hong Kong, a wealthy 90-year-old woman was defrauded for a whopping € 27 million by criminals disguised as security officers. This was all done over the phone, making it the largest form of phone fraud Hong Kong has ever seen. A 19-year-old student has been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the fraud.
Last summer, the criminals contacted the woman on the phone. They said that they are from the security apparatus and that there is a dangerous situation. It is said that her identity was stolen by strangers, which put her fortune at risk.
The fraudsters told the elderly woman to transfer the money from her bank account to the investigation team account for safekeeping and monitoring. “She promised to return all the money to her after the investigation,” a police source said. South China Morning Newspaper.
SIM card
A few days after the annoying phone call, a young man came to her to give her a private cell phone and SIM card. This gave the impression that the woman would be taken care of, but in reality criminals tried to protect phone conversations with her as much as possible.
The 90-year-old, who lives in a huge estate, transferred a total of 250 million Hong Kong dollars (transferred 26.6 million euros) between August and January, spread across 11 different deals. At one point, her bank asked why she was making such unusually large transactions. She told them that she was buying real estate and not being questioned further.
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The deception only surfaced when one of the cleaning workers became suspicious and warned her daughter. She did not report this immediately, but did ask a member of her family to follow her mother. This way she tried to find out why she suddenly takes trips to the bank so often. Last month, the daughter finally convinced her mother to file a report under the supervision of a lawyer.
Since then, police have arrested a 19-year-old student who went to the woman’s home last July. He has since been released on bail. Police are not ruling out more arrests. Hong Kong has it, according to Watchman One of the highest concentrations of billionaires in the world. Among them are many elderly people, who, according to the newspaper, are vulnerable to fraudsters. In the first quarter of this year, the number of reports of phone fraud rose by nearly 20 percent.
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