Police today held the Bank Staff Recognition Ceremony to commend the efforts of banks and their frontline staff in assisting the force to combat deception cases.

Addressing the ceremony, Commissioner of Police Siu Chak-yee said the force works in close collaboration with the banking sector to tackle deception cases and noted the fact that fraudsters employ different defrauding tricks to commit crimes with the use of phones and the Internet.

Since its establishment, the Anti-Deception Co-ordination Centre has successfully prevented 1,760 scam cases from happening with the joint efforts of Police and the banking industry.

Among them, some 460 cases were detected by bank staff and as a direct result, 571 fraudsters were arrested and over $10.7 billion was intercepted.

Mr Siu praised the frontline bank employees for their vigilance and professionalism which had successfully prevented scams from taking place.

Additionally, he expressed the hope that Police would deepen its collaboration with the banking sector to intercept payments to fraudsters in a round-the-clock manner and added that the force hoped the trade could make use of RegTech (regulatory technology) in crime detection and prevention.

At today’s ceremony, both individual and co-operate awards were presented in recognition of the banks’ contribution in the prevention and inspection of deception cases.

In the past year and a half, 192 frontline bank staff assisted Police in identifying 290 such cases and reported them to the co-ordination centre.

Police also pointed out that one bank, which was given the Effective Application of RegTech award, had detected at least 26 ongoing deception cases by applying such regulatory technology.