Nope, you’re not reading the Onion.
Regina Ip, a lawmaker and the former secretary for security, admitted she got tricked by one of the oldest email scams in the book, leading to USD65,000 (HKD504,000) getting transferred out of a bank account in Switzerland.
It’s a mistake that might elicit some degree of empathy if she were someone’s elderly grandmother, but not so much if she was at one point the top dog in charge of crime – including cybersecurity – for the city.
The oblivious lawmaker thought she was helping a friend in need when she received an email from MTR Corporation chairman Raymond Chien.
“He wrote in the email, ‘Regina, I need help. Urgent. Please open the attachment’,” Ip said yesterday, according to the SCMP.
“I thought a friend needed help so I opened the attachment at once. I guess that’s when I fell into the trap.”
Ip, there are a lot of Nigerian princes in dire need of help that we’d like to introduce you to. And did we mention that our fourth-removed cousin from Bermuda died and left us EUR14,5 trillion and we could really use your help to get it?
She said she received an email from Chien a few hours later, urging her to change her password since his email got hacked.
She forgot to do so because she was “busy”.
This is the woman, may we remind you, who strongly hinted on Sunday that she is thinking of runnning for the chief executive posittion in 2017.
Ip believes that the money was swindled when hackers duplicated an instruction she once made to transfer money from her Swiss bank account to an account in the US.
It’s unclear whether she’ll get her money back.
Speaking of Swiss bank accounts, a recent investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) revealed a list of 22,000 people with addresses in Hong Kong and China who are clients of companies that help to create offshore bank accounts.
The ICIJ says that offshore accounts allow the rich and the powerful to avoid paying taxes and keep their business secret from the public.
Photo: Wrightbus via Wikimedia
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