Model Rosemary’s mother loses HK$20m in phone scam
Local | 5 May 2021 7:25 pm
Julie Pang Li, the mother of famous model Rosemary Vandenbroucke, lost HK$20 million in a fake Mainland official telephone scam.
The case was listed as obtaining property by deception. So far no arrest has been made.
It was understood that Pang, 70, who lives in Sorrento near Kowloon Station, received a call on March 18, from a man who claimed he was a Mainland officer .
The fraudster accused Pang of being involved in a money laundering case and asked her to provide information of her bank account and passwords for investigation. Pang then gave him the information of her seven bank accounts.
The fraudster claimed that a sum of money in the accounts will be transferred for investigation, and told Pang to keep it confidential and not to check her accounts.
Pang then became suspicious and checked her bank accounts, finding that around HK$20 million had been transferred from four accounts through online banking. She then reported the incident to police on April 16.
Records showed that Pang married her ex-husband Alain Roger Aguste Vandenbroucke in 1980 and gave birth to Rosemary Vandenbroucke in the next year. The couple divorced in 2007 and brought it to the court over the asset distribution. The court in the end ordered her to pay her ex-husband over HK$20 million and to sell her property.
Police recorded a total of 15,553 scams in the past year, almost a 90 percent increase in a year. The number of phone scam also rose to 1,193 after a 84 percent growth, and loss involved increased from HK$150 million in 2019 to HK$570 million in last year.
The national security law is also used by fraudsters when executing phone scams. Police recorded 15 fake national security law phone scams last year, in which victims lost about HK$2.2 million.
