Six men jailed for cross-border phone scam in HK

Five men from the Chinese mainland and one man from China's Taiwan have been jailed for between 16 months and two years in connection with a cross-border telephone scam in which victims lost 2.5 million Hong Kong dollars (about 323,000 U.S. dollars).

The defendants pleaded guilty to money laundering charges, according to local radio report on Wednesday.

The District Court heard that three women from Taiwan, including a retired professor, received calls from people claiming to be nurses or law enforcement officers, and asked them to deposit money into various bank accounts in Hong Kong. The defendants later received or attempted to receive the money that had been transferred to the accounts.

Hong Kong was recently inundated with a wave of similar telephone scams which saw victims lose tens of millions of dollars. However, police said the number of such calls has decreased recently and there have been fewer reports of people being cheated out of their money. Endi