Online rental platforms have become scammers’ latest tool for swindling Hong Kong residents, as the number of online investment fraud cases rose by nearly a quarter in the first six months of 2025 compared with the same period last year, with losses surging 36.4 per cent to HK$1.48 billion (US$189.5 million).
Police Senior Superintendent Carmen Leung Oi-lam said that online rental platforms were a new channel that scammers were recently exploiting to establish contact with victims.
“When some property owners put their flats on online rental platforms, scammers will target them, posing as high-income potential tenants,” Leung warned.
The force recorded 2,273 investment scams from January to June, a 24.8 per cent rise from 1,822 cases in the same period last year.
Losses in the first half of the year reached HK$1.48 billion, 36.4 per cent higher than the HK$1.09 billion recorded in the same period in 2024.
The biggest investment scam involved a 65-year-old retiree who lost more than HK$30 million in April after joining a stock investment group on WhatsApp via a Facebook page.
Leung said that in an investment scam, fraudsters would first reach out to victims on WhatsApp or Telegram chat groups before conning them into transferring money on sham platforms.
“These groups usually claim to have insider knowledge or offer investment tips, with scammers posing as sought-after analysts or veteran investors,” she said.
“Scammers also arrange for accomplices to post screenshots of large profits to fool victims into believing the ruse.”
Leung said “pig butchering” scams had also increased in the first half of the year.
Pig butchering is an online scam in which fraudsters gain the trust of victims over time, often under the guise of a romantic relationship, and then deceive them into putting money into fake investments.
The largest reported pig butchering scam up to August this year concerned a 52-year-old insurance company worker who was duped by a scammer posing as a wealthy prospective tenant looking to rent her flat.
The divorced woman was contacted by the scammer last November and began investing according to the scammer’s instructions a month later. She also fell into a romantic relationship with the fraudster and only realised she had been defrauded when she failed to withdraw her invested sums in March.
“The woman transferred HK$20 million and HK$11 million in cryptocurrency to designated bank accounts, losing HK$31 million in total,” Leung said.
The force recorded 199 cases of pig butchering scams in the first six months of 2025, a 24 per cent rise from the 160 cases in the same period last year. Losses also increased by 28.6 per cent year on year, from HK$140 million in the first six months of 2024 to HK$180 million in the same period this year.
Leung added that social media tended to be a gateway to investment swindles, with 55.4 per cent of such scams, or 1,260 cases, recorded between January and June involving victims being approached on WhatsApp.
Scammers also used Facebook in 411 cases and Instagram in 226 cases to reach out to victims.
Maggie Tam Chun-lan, Meta’s head of public policy in Hong Kong, said the social media giant had launched new safety tools on its messaging platform WhatsApp two weeks ago to enhance users’ awareness of potential risks when added to new chat groups by unknown contacts.
“We have been constantly upgrading our AI machine learning [system] and liaising with government partners and law enforcement to understand new trends,” she said.
The new tools include a safety overview pop-up message that appears when a user is added to a chat group by an unknown contact. The pop-up shows the name and phone number of the contact who added the user, the total number of members and the date the group was created.
Safety tips reminding users to look out for scams are also shown, and users can leave such groups without entering to view their contents.
A similar reminder is shown at the start of individual chats with new phone numbers that have not been added as a contact.
Tam said Meta had blocked more than 6.8 million WhatsApp accounts globally that were linked to scam farms in Southeast Asia in the first six months of this year.
