Spam or scam? How unwanted phone calls – from salesmen or crooks – plague Hongkongers despite countermeasures

Hongkongers have become wearily familiar with incoming “spam” phone calls, which once started with the giveaway number “3” but are now harder to spot. Telemarketers are merely annoying, but “scam” calls from their criminal counterparts can lead to severe financial losses.

HKFP looks at the rise in both telemarketing and scam calls in the city despite efforts by police and the telecommunications regulator to combat them.

According to a report by call-blocker app HKJunkCall last October, more than 16,000 person-to-person telemarketing calls, or spam calls, were reported in the first nine months of 2023 – a 70 per cent increase compared to the previous year.

HKJunkCall founder William Wu estimated that the reported cases represented only about 20 per cent of the total.

However, a law to ban telemarketing calls is considered unworkable, according to the Office of the Communications Authority (OFCA). In a reply to HKFP, the OFCA said many such calls originate overseas.

Also, as companies have a “genuine need to conduct business through various remote means,” including telemarketing calls, the government must consider whether regulation would affect commercial activities, the authority said – though it acknowledged the “possible nuisance” they caused.

Calls made through automated systems or through the internet can disguise their origin and complicate enforcement efforts, the authority added.

When it comes to combating spam, the government’s policy is to offload responsibility to call blockers such as HKJunkCall, Wu told HKFP in a phone interview last month.

Legislation infeasible

A licensing or registration system would be effective in regulating spam calls, Wu said, if it was not practicable to enact legislation against them by extending the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Ordinance (UEMO) to telemarketing calls.

“Whether to ban [telemarketing calls] or not is one thing, but they have to at least be regulated,” he said, adding that a registration system would also help protect people against unethical sales tactics.

The finance, insurance, and telecommunications sectors, as well as call centres, have codes of practice on telemarketing under a “self-regulatory arrangement,” according to OFCA. The authority said in a statement that it was “working with the telecommunications industry to refine its code of practice” for telemarketing calls, and would invite other sectors to join the self-regulatory arrangement.

In fact, the government proposed legislation in 2018 to bring telemarketing calls under the ambit of the UEMO, which currently only regulates commercial electronic messages including SMS, pre-recorded messages and spam emails. But as of March 2024, nothing has been done.

“I would say 90 per cent of people support enacting legislation,” Wu said. “If the government listens to citizens, it would set up laws against cold calls.”

The OFCA does not differentiate between “warm calls” and “cold calls” even though cold calls made up more than 95 per cent of all telemarketing calls at the time of a 2017 consultation.

The lack of differentiation prompted criticism from telemarketers in 2018 when the government proposed setting up a do-not-call register managed by the city’s privacy watchdog. They said warm callers – sales agents who already had prior contact with a customer – would be unfairly affected by the blanket measure.

Scams on the rise

Unwanted calls can also be more sinister, with phone scam cases rising by 13.5 per cent last year. According to police figures, 786 phone scams were recorded in the first half of 2022, increasing to 2,045 cases in the second half.

The figure fell to 1,579 cases in the first half of 2023 but slightly increased to 1,634 in the second half.

Police and the communications regulator stress that phone scam cases decreased from a peak in the second half of 2022 as a result of their efforts, but the city still recorded an overall year-on-year increase of 382 cases the following year.

See also: 11 mainland Chinese students at Hong Kong university swindled out of HK$8.4 million

The continued upsurge comes despite the implementation of a real-name SIM card registration system that required pre-paid and service plan SIM cards users to register their full name, date of birth, and identity card before February 23, 2023, to access telecommunications services in Hong Kong.

Officials said the move would help thwart crime – including scammers, identity thieves and manufacturers of home-made bombs – though experts say workarounds remained. In 2021, a senior Beijing official said the registration scheme would safeguard national security.

The registration scheme also sparked privacy concerns, according to a 2021 survey, while a journalist group said it may deter sources from speaking to reporters. Last May, a legal challenge against the requirement was launched at the city’s High Court.

The SIM registration system was not meant to nip phone scams in the bud, Wu told HKFP, but to help combat them after the fact. “Everyone in Hong Kong has an ID card, but that doesn’t mean you can leave your doors wide open and expect not to get robbed,” he said. “Real-name registration can’t prevent scams.”

Even though OFCA limits users to 10 prepaid SIM registrations and has rejected more than 1.3 million registration requests since the scheme was introduced, hundreds of newly registered numbers cropped up every day, Wu said – an indication there were still loopholes in the authority’s enforcement of its regulations.

According to a 2023 report by Gogolook, parent company of Whoscall and HKJunkCall, 45 per cent of Hongkongers encounter scams every day while 26 per cent said they do so “most of the week” – the highest incidence of the 11 Asian regions surveyed.

An HKFP reporter received an average of about a dozen cold calls a week, including some from numbers prefixed with “+852” – an indicator that the person on the other end of the line was masquerading as a local caller through a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) system.

Authorities have also taken other measures to combat scams.

As of January 2024, about 520,000 local telephone numbers were suspended under a code of practice established by OFCA last year requiring telecoms providers to monitor calls from their networks and systems.

Mobile service providers have also sent more than 23 million alerts warning users against numbers prefixed with “+852”.

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