Why Being Scammed Once in Hong Kong Often Means Being Scammed Again

According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, phone calls and SMS remain the top way scammers reach people in Hong Kong, and most victims are not caught once. They are caught again and again.

The 2026 Asia Scam Report: Hong Kong, produced with Whoscall and Mastercard, surveyed how people in the city encounter scams and what happens after. The headline figure is stark: 81% of respondents encountered a scam in the past year. Phone calls and SMS lead as points of first contact, and WhatsApp leads among individual digital platforms.

The mechanism: one scam becomes several

The scam does not stop at the first call or text. Of those surveyed, 48% went on to interact with a scammer. Among that group, 21% lost money and 14% handed over personal information. The report also found that 33% of parents said their underage children had been scammed, which shows the approach is not limited to adults managing their own accounts.

The part that matters most is what happens after someone has already been caught once. Among people who had been scammed, about 63% were victimized more than once. More than a quarter, 27%, said they had been scammed five times. Another 6% said it happened more than five times.

This pattern shows the scam does not depend on a single convincing message. It depends on repetition. A scammer who has already reached someone once, through a phone call or an SMS, has a target who has not yet built a defense against the next attempt. Once personal information or money has moved, the same channel, often the same type of call or text, works again.

Confidence is not the same as protection

Brian D. Hanley, Director of the GASA APAC Chapter, pointed to a related pattern from Thailand: seven in ten adults believed they could recognize a scam, yet 58% of those exposed still interacted with one, and a quarter of those interactions led to financial loss. Believing a scam is recognizable does not stop someone from engaging with it when it arrives.

Jeff Kuo, Co-founder and CEO of Gogolook, which built Whoscall, said scams now reach people through the channels they use every day, from phone calls and texts to messaging apps, and said more than 60% of Hong Kong victims have been scammed more than once.

The sequence the report describes runs from contact, to interaction, to loss, and then back to contact again. Being scammed once does not inoculate anyone. It can mark someone as a target who answers the phone.