Hong Kong Police Force assistant commissioner Wong Fook-chuen yesterday expressed hope that the number of technology crime in the city would go down.

Speaking at the High Technology Crime Investigation seminar, Wong said there were 741 technology crimes in 2006. And the number of crimes for the first 10 months of 2007 stood at 549.

Wong expected that the total number of technology crime this year would drop by about 10 percent to 650 cases.

Speaking about the various types of tech crimes, he explained that more than half of the technology crimes involved fraud cases in online games.

Some of the games offered virtual weapons which can be purchased by players. Police have received complaints over the years concerning pilferage of these virtual weapons and misuse of online gaming accounts, which resulted in accumulation of large sums to the victims' bills.

Expressing satisfaction over the department's efforts in combating technology crimes, Wong said the police, however, had not received reports concerning the computer system of large organizations being hacked.

Wong said the community must be aware that Hong Kong laws were also applied to the use of internet.

A 14-year-old youngster, who claimed himself to be a triad group member on the Internet, had been arrested, Wong said. The action of the teenage was against the Societies Ordinance, he added.

Police technology crime division forensics and training chief inspector Paul Jackson said recovering the data from computers used by the criminals for evidence was becoming more difficult because of the prevalence of encryption, a process of transforming information into unreadable format.

"It is more difficult to recover the data to readable format," he said.

University of Hong Kong Centre for Information Security and Cryptography associate director Chow Kam-pui said personal computers shared by family members were more vulnerable to criminals.

He said family users unknowingly might have installed Trojan Horse, a malicious program that allowed unauthorized person to gain access to data stored in the computers, when they were downloading software.

Meanwhile, the center has been customizing a software used in Australia for Hong Kong police. This will allow officers to detect whether the computers found in the crime scene contained criminal evidence and whether the machines should be taken to police lab for further forensic analysis, he added.

(HK Edition 12/13/2007 page6)