‘Rampant like a pandemic’: why Hongkongers struggle to get peace from junk calls

Hongkonger Chan Shuk-wah feels exhausted by the constant ringing of her phone. On any given weekday, nearly all of the calls lighting up her phone are from unknown numbers — as many as a dozen each day, mostly selling health checks or pushing loan applications. The relentless calls have disrupted her professional life as a logistics company manager and as the only child of two elderly parents, both approaching 80. “These cold calls are just rampant, like a pandemic. I’m exhausted because I don’t have the luxury of ignoring unknown numbers,” the 49-year-old said. “Any one of them could be a legitimate business emergency or someone alerting me to my parents’ situation while I am at work.” Chan is among the thousands of residents affected by a surge in junk calls, with 466,000 reported in 2025 alone. The figure represents a 50 per cent increase from the previous year and a 93 per cent rise from 2023, according to crowdsourced reporting platform HKJunkCall. Among these calls, those touting loans and bank investments saw the highest growth, rising by nearly 160,000 cases, or 89 per cent, in two years. Those for healthcare check-up calls reached 58,000 last year, 10 times the figure from 2023. Experts have argued that the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Ordinance, enacted in 2007, has become outdated due to the use of artificial intelligence to drive cold calls. But they have also warned that a total ban remains difficult, given the need to strike a balance between protecting residents from a bombardment of calls and the legitimate marketing needs of the city’s small business sector. The ordinance allows residents to enrol their phone numbers in “Do-Not-Call Registers” to avoid receiving faxes, messages and pre-recorded calls. Once registered, senders are legally barred from contacting those numbers for commercial purposes after 10 working days. But the legislation leaves person-to-person interactive calls unregulated. Ronald Pong, chairman of a committee under the Smart City Consortium, said the cold call situation had become “hopeless” because technology was moving much faster than the law. “Many callers now use overseas servers to mimic local Hong Kong numbers, making it nearly impossible for local authorities to trace or block the source of such harassment,” he said. Pong said mimicking local numbers allowed call centres to operate through overseas services, avoiding the cost of doing business in Hong Kong and overcoming residents’ wariness to answer foreign numbers. “You can report as many times as you want, but a new number will eventually call you,” he said. To combat sophisticated AI bots that exploit legal loopholes, Pong suggested using AI-filtering apps to “fight back” and screen callers before the phone even rings. He added that Apple’s “silence unknown callers” option for iPhones provided a basic shield, while “live voicemail” offered real-time transcripts and allowed residents to instantly distinguish between a telemarketing bot and a genuine emergency without answering. “The law simply cannot catch up with the speed of technological advancement,” Pong said. Lawmaker Duncan Chiu, who represents the innovation and technology sector, said that while public frustration was at its peak, a complete ban on person-to-person calls could cripple local businesses reliant on direct outreach for survival. “Some beauty parlours and fitness centres occasionally depend on cold calls to acquire new customers,” he said. “Regarding regulating telemarketing, we need to sit down and discuss it with the relevant industries.” Chiu noted that the government was collaborating with the telecommunications sector to implement multilayered defences by utilising AI solutions to assist in blocking phone numbers that had been reported by the public or flagged as suspicious. “The solutions offered by service providers should be effective in handling the surge in these incoming calls,” the lawmaker said. In a reply to the South China Morning Post, the Office of the Communications Authority said some AI-driven calls were regulated under the ordinance. “For calls that communicate with recipients solely with AI-generated voice and without any person-to-person interactive communications, or the synthesised element is not activated in response to information communicated by the caller, such a call will be subject to the regulation,” an office spokesman said. He said the office would monitor market trends and technological advancements, such as AI in telecommunications, and assess the effectiveness of the ordinance. The office said many service providers offered call filtering and anonymous call blocking – regardless of AI involvement – to reduce nuisance contact for those aged 60 or above, while encouraging the public to adopt filtering tools provided by their carriers to minimise suspicious calls. The body has already mandated that service providers monitor suspicious patterns and terminate fraudulent numbers, with the initiative leading to the suspension of 1.58 million local numbers by December 2025 to combat deception, in collaboration with police, to combat phone scams.