Hong Kong to criminalise misuse of others' identities for SIM card registration
Hong Kong's commerce chief announced plans to amend laws to criminalise using others' names to register SIM cards without authorisation. Measures include lowering the cap on prepaid cards per user and using AI to detect suspicious patterns, which halved suspended numbers to 5,700 monthly.
Hong Kong's Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development, Edward Yiu, has announced that the government is preparing legislative amendments to criminalise the misuse of another person's identity to register telephone SIM cards without lawful authority or reasonable excuse. The move is part of broader efforts to strengthen the city's prevention and combat of telecom and online fraud.
In a written reply to a lawmaker's question, Yiu said the government is conducting a comprehensive review of the real-name registration system for mobile SIM cards and devising more targeted reinforcement measures. These include lowering the maximum number of prepaid SIM cards that individual users can register, and creating a new offence for unauthorised use of another person's identity for SIM card registration. The government is actively preparing the details of the legislative amendments and will consult the public in due course.
Yiu noted that telecom operators have fully deployed artificial intelligence and big data technologies to detect suspicious call or SMS patterns. When such patterns are identified, operators suspend the relevant phone numbers. The Communications Authority implemented a revised Code of Practice in December 2025, which further tightened criteria for identifying suspicious patterns based on operational experience, to step up efforts against telecom fraud.
From January to August 2026, an average of about 5,700 local phone numbers were suspended per month, a sharp reduction of nearly half from the average of about 11,400 per month in the same period of 2025. Yiu described this as evidence of the effectiveness of the enhanced measures.
Since September 2022, operators have been required to block or suspend suspicious web links and phone numbers based on fraud records provided by the police. As of the end of August 2026, operators had cumulatively blocked or suspended over 120,000 web links and more than 17,000 local and non-local phone numbers. Additionally, since April 2023, operators have been required by the Communications Authority to block suspicious incoming calls starting with "+852". As of the end of August 2026, operators had successfully blocked over 8.9 million such overseas calls, effectively defending Hong Kong's telecom network.