The HKMA's daily emails often include information about fake banking websites.

Today's alert refers to four such incidents:

China Construction Bank
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ASIA) Limited
China Industrial Bank
Chong Hing Bank
The Bank of East Asia

The reason it interests us is that it is such a persistent method of committing fraud. Most frauds have, historically, been cyclical but this one is constant. Those behind the fraud are never, so far as we know, identified and /or prosecuted.

The frauds are perpetrated by the creation of a false website which appears to be genuine and by a mass email campaign. It is difficult to imagine, in a population of less than seven million, anyone who has not had several fraudulent emails in the past few weeks, never mind the past decades.

Information is also circulated by phone, SMS, messaging and through social media. These are not new frauds, they are merely criminals using every available means of communicating to contact potential victims so as to commit the same frauds.