The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) will boost monitoring of suspicious transactions on university students’ accounts by sharing a new set of fraud risk indicators with banks by the end of September.

The efforts by the city’s de facto central bank came as police warned that scam losses among mainland Chinese students made up more than half the total among the group.

Senior Superintendent Terry Law Kwok-hoi of the police force’s commercial crime bureau said on Thursday that 957 students fell prey to scams in the city between January and June, with 313, or nearly a third, being from the mainland.

“While there are more cases of local students being scammed, mainland students tend to suffer higher losses in their cases,” Law said.

Mainland students lost HK$60 million (US$7.7 million) in scams in the first half of the year, making up 55.5 per cent of all student losses in the period.

Among the different types of swindles, phone scams, in which fraudsters pretended to be law enforcement officials or customer service staff, led to the highest average loss.