香港特別行政區 訴 Terence Chiong Mev Leong 及另五人

On 29 July 2026, Deputy Judge Kwok Wai-kin of the District Court handed down sentence in HKSAR v Terence Chiong Mev Leong & 5 others (DCCC 1583/2025), jailing six Malaysian nationals for their part in running four "modem pool" call centres that funnelled mainland-style "fake customer service" phone scams into Hong Kong. Senior Public Prosecutor Ms Leung Po-ki prosecuted for HKSAR. All six pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to defraud, contrary to common law and punishable under s.159C(6) of the Crimes Ordinance (Cap. 200), carrying a maximum of 14 years' imprisonment.

The six defendants were arrested on 22 August 2024 when the Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau raided four premises in San Po Kong and Ngau Tau Kok. Each premises functioned as a self-contained "cat-pool" centre: racks of modem-pool devices loaded with prepaid SIM (PPS) cards, plugged in to computers connected to the internet. Investigators seized 1,355 PPS cards still inserted in the machines and a further 46,292 used cards across the four sites. The system was built to bypass the "+852, call from outside Hong Kong, beware of scam" warning that the local telecoms infrastructure attaches to overseas-originated calls, by originating the calls from local SIMs. Traffic logs showed 85,948 outgoing calls over a 10-day window in August 2024, reaching 75,552 unique recipients. Forty-three identified victims, aged 20 to 81, lost a combined HK$5,875,053 after being told their WeChat insurance or mobile service would be cancelled unless they paid. Payments flowed through 75 bank accounts. The phones of D1 to D4 and D6 contained 223 identity document images, including 13 forged Hong Kong ID images, used to register 852 local phone numbers. All four leases were signed by a Malaysian national named Chieng Siew Hong on instructions from a figure called "Brother Hung". The six defendants were foot soldiers, recruited in Malaysia, paid modest sums (D1 received HK$15,000), and tasked with inserting SIMs, registering cards, testing lines, and managing one or more centres.

The Court's reasoning

The court held that imprisonment was the only appropriate sentence for each defendant (§55). Adopting the guidance in HKSAR v Leung Yiu-fai (CACC 100/2014) on deterrent sentencing for public-facing scams, the court set baseline terms before the guilty plea discount and the organised-crime uplift: 60 months for D1, who carried the scam-message template, recruited others, and managed Centre 2 (§66); 54 months for D2, D3 and D4, who operated the pools over roughly two months (§§67-68); 48 months for D5, who additionally edited ID images for PPS registration (§69); and 45 months for D6, who tested SIMs and had the shortest involvement (§70). The court rejected the "logistics support" characterisation, finding that the defendants' work was the front-line step that dismantled Hong Kong's anti-fraud telecoms defences, without which the overseas callers could not reach victims as local numbers (§58). Claims of economic duress, ignorance, and limited role did not warrant further reduction beyond the one-third credit for an early guilty plea (§§62-63). The prosecution's s.27(11)(b) OSCO uplift application succeeded: based on Chief Inspector Tsang's statistics, the court found "fake customer service" scams still prevalent, with 10.96 cases and HK$1.47 million lost per day in early 2026, and added one-third to each headline term (§79). Final sentences: D1: 53 months; D2, D3, D4: 48 months each; D5: 42 months; D6: 40 months (§81).

What it means for practitioners

Two practical points. First, the court will not characterise on-site modem-pool operators as providing mere "logistics" support; their work is treated as the indispensable front-line act that defeats Hong Kong's anti-scam call-display regime, and custodial deterrence is the starting point. Second, the OSCO s.27 uplift is available where the prosecution proves ongoing prevalence and community harm, and a 33% uplift was applied even though overall fake-customer-service case numbers had dropped from 2024 peaks, because absolute daily case and loss figures remained very high. Defence mitigation beyond a guilty-plea discount, including hardship and family circumstances, will be given limited weight once prevalence and the one-third discount are accounted for.