香港特別行政區 訴 沈明慧

On 10 August 2026, Deputy District Judge Kwok Wai Kin sentenced Sham Ming Wai to 60 months' imprisonment across two consolidated cases (DCCC 1145/2024 and DCCC 387/2026) for six counts of dealing with property known or believed to represent proceeds of an indictable offence, contrary to s.25(1) and (3) of the Organized and Serious Crimes Ordinance (Cap. 455). Mr Hui Ming-hon of the Department of Justice prosecuted; Mr Tang Siu-man of Tang Siu-man & Co. represented the defendant.

The defendant, a 39-year-old housewife receiving HK$10,000 a month in Comprehensive Social Security Assistance, sold six bank accounts she had opened at Livi, Citic, HSBC, Nanyang, ICBC (Asia), and Chong Hing to a contact called "Ah Lik" for HK$3,500 each. The accounts received and disbursed funds totalling over HK$34 million between August 2020 and May 2025, all in a mirror-pattern, low-balance, pass-through fashion characteristic of money mule accounts. Two upstream victims were traced: a HK$203,254 investment-scam deposit from Ms Wong into the Nanyang account, and HK$88,848 in telephone-scam deposits from three complainants into the Chong Hing account. The defendant pleaded guilty to all six counts.

The court held that: (1) selling bank accounts to a known buyer for cash, knowing they will be used to handle third-party funds, makes the seller a participant in money laundering, even without knowledge of the upstream offence (§64); (2) deterrence is the paramount sentencing consideration, and the modest HK$3,500 per-account payment does not mitigate culpability (§66); (3) the case is closely analogous to HKSAR v Fung Shiu-hei James [2026] HKCA 1367, where a four-year starting point was upheld for a single-account lender (§75); and (4) the s.27 OSCO enhancement threshold was met, with money mule cases still accounting for 73.29% of arrested persons in 2026 and puppet-account losses exceeding HK$816 million in the first five months of 2026 alone (§98-99).

The judge applied a one-third uplift under s.27(11)(b) on top of a one-third guilty plea discount, arriving at a global sentence of 60 months: 32 months for Case 1, with 28 months of the 53-month Case 2 concurrent total ordered consecutive to Case 1.

For practitioners advising clients facing similar charges: the modest per-account fee is no shield. Where the prosecution can show the offence remains prevalent and community harm substantial, the statutory enhancement will apply, and custodial sentences for account sellers will routinely run into the four-to-five-year range.