HK Court orders return of S$99,500 to Singaporean scam victim

The sum had been converted to HK$550,000 and transferred to a Citibank (Hong Kong) account. - Reuters

SINGAPORE (The Straits Times/Asia News Network): A Hong Kong judge ordered the return of monies to a Singaporean phone fraud victim whose lost funds were traced to a Hong Kong bank account deposit.

Roberta Teh, 52, had fallen prey to a man who had phoned her in April 2021, claiming to be a staff member of her phone service provider.

The caller told her there had been unusual activities in her data usage and that she was a suspect of money laundering activities.

He directed her to download an application program called “Quick support”.

After downloading and installing the application, Teh provided her username and the PIN on the application to the caller.

She followed his instructions, which let him remotely access and control her laptop computer and her mobile phone.

Later in the afternoon, he told her he would continue his checks the next morning. But in the evening of the same day, Teh discovered that most of the money in her bank account had disappeared.

She still thought that the caller might have held her money temporarily for the purpose of his checks but when he did not call back the next day, she reported that her funds were missing to her bank and the Singapore police.

It emerged that $99,500 had been transferred from her DBS Bank account to her Citibank account in Singapore on April 30, 2021.

The sum was then converted to HK$550,000 and transferred to the Citibank (Hong Kong) account of a Lui Chun Seng.

He had opened the Hong Kong account just two weeks earlier with a HK$200 deposit.

Following the fraud alert, Lui’s bank account was frozen through the Hong Kong police.

Teh then applied to a Hong Kong court to declare the HK$550,000 in the account was held on trust for her and the monies be released to her lawyers as stakeholders of trust funds.

The bank notified the court that it took a neutral position and left the case to the court’s decision. Lui, who was named in the court papers as the first defendant, did not show up in court.

Deputy District Judge C. K. Siu in judgment grounds on Aug 28 accepted that the papers had been duly served on both defendants.

‘I am satisfied that justice is served if declaratory relief is granted in this case which can be disposed of summarily even in the absence of the first defendant,” he said, based on Hong Kong court rules.

“I have no doubt that the money in the first defendant’s Citibank (Hong Kong) bank account was the money that was fraudulently received and transferred from the plaintiff’s Citibank Singapore bank account,” he added.