$156k vanishes after buyer falls for cheap laptop offer online

A Hong Kong buyer lost HK$1.23 million, or about $156,000, after a fraudster pretending to sell a secondhand laptop spent almost a month inventing fees and collecting transfers. Hong Kong police announced the case on Monday through their CyberDefender platform.

The scam started on a price comparison website in March. The victim found what looked like a well-priced laptop, made contact, and the seller immediately started asking for more money. This is to cover shipping costs and customs clearance charges. The seller continued to ask for one fee after another.

The victim sent 80 transfers over 30 days, with some of the transfers being conducted through Bitcoin ATMs. The realization that no laptop would ever be delivered was ultimately provoked by a conversation with family members.

Sunk cost psychology drove 80 payments

Hong Kong police cited the sunk cost fallacy as the mechanism that kept the transfers flowing. It’s a psychological trap in which each new payment seems like the last step before the customer may reclaim all past purchases.

Cash transfers through Bitcoin ATMs are difficult to recover. Crypto transactions settle fast and are practically irreversible. Most consumer protection laws do not apply to them, which is why fraudsters often use them.

At some time, the accumulated fees must have surpassed the laptop’s initial price by a huge margin, which CyberDefender warns consumers to use as an instant stop signal.

Before transmitting money to any merchant found on an online platform, CyberDefender suggests using its Scameter+ mobile app to verify phone numbers, payment accounts, and site addresses.

Hong Kong’s fraud caseload keeps climbing

In early May 2026, Hong Kong police disclosed that they had received more than 70 reports of online investment fraud in a single week, with combined losses above HK$80 million or about $10.2 million.

One of the worst individual cases from that stretch involved a woman in her 40s who lost HK$1.2 million, four years of her salary, to a cryptocurrency scam run through WeChat, as Cryptopolitan reported. A man who presented himself as a crypto investment expert pointed her to a fake trading platform. Fake portfolio gains built up on screen over 50 days. She transferred funds to bank accounts and crypto wallets that the scammer controlled before finding out the numbers were entirely made up.

CyberDefender data showed online romance scams climbed 8.2% in 2025, reaching 1,093 reported cases. In one instance, a woman in her 50s lost HK$31 million after a scammer who posed as a prospective tenant on a property platform gradually steered her toward bogus crypto investments.

TRM Labs found that scam reports involving AI tools jumped 456% between May 2024 and April 2025. Fake trading platforms that display real time prices are one of the most common tools in hackers/scammers’ playbook, whether the target is in Hong Kong or anywhere else.