The nineteen arrestees included 12 men and seven women aged between 34 and 70. Their scam involved 11 shell companies and 12 applications, with funding totaling around HK$59 million.

The arrestees were closely related, according to chief inspector Mok Lai-king from the police’s Commercial Crime Bureau, who added four of them are brothers and sisters, and eight others are four pairs of married couples.

They were reportedly businesspeople, homemakers, chefs, fitness coaches, and insurance managers.

The arrestees had multiple identities in those firms simultaneously, like one who was a director of one shell company but also a worker for the other ten companies.

That arrestee, who earned up to HK$1.73 million in only a few months, saw his monthly salary fall to less than HK$5,000 or even zero after the company successfully obtained the loan from the government. Some were even immediately fired, Mok said.

After verifying a vast amount of Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) records, police confirmed the hiring of a “shadow employee,” where a person has multiple fake employments simultaneously.

Investigations also revealed that all the companies claimed to be in the information technology sector or relevant consultancy businesses.

Some companies had the same registered address, and the money would be wired to personal bank accounts or withdrawn in cash after the loan was approved.

Police said they had frozen some of the bank accounts and are now tracking the whereabouts of some of the funding.

Police said they had received a total of 12 complaints on different channels since 2021 and found fraudsters have been cheating over HK$1.4 billion in subsidy from the government by submitting over 300 applications using false documents, including untrue paycheck records and operation reports.

Police have then carried out five waves of arrest operations and arrested a total of 123 men and 52 women, including the 19 men and women.