To step up combating actions against deception and enhance university students’ awareness of various kinds of deception and scams, SAO and the Chinese Mainland Students’ Association (中國內地學生協會) jointly initiated a collaborative talk series and co-organised the first talk at the beginning of Semester 2 on 14 January 2022. The talk was tailormade to motivate mainland students to learn more about telephone deception tricks and to raise the awareness of cultivating a caring network to safeguard the well-being of their peers who might fall prey to fraudulent crimes.
Vice President (Student and Global Affairs), Prof Ben Young, supported the initiative amid the surge of telephone deception cases in which more and more university students, in particular those from the Chinese Mainland, have been tricked by fraudsters into handing over personal bank information to scam callers who claim to be bank staff, mainland officials or law enforcers.
The talk was delivered online by experienced speakers from the Anti-Deception Coordination Centre (ADCC, 反詐騙協調中心) of Hong Kong Police Force and was well received by around 70 students at undergraduate, postgraduate and research levels. Anti-scam alert pamphlets and promotional gifts produced by ADCC were given out to equip students with additional tips for recognising and combating spam and scam calls.