How?
Hong Kong has also proposed new offences under the real-name registration system to criminalise the improper use of SIMs registered in another person’s name
Is no id card required for registration?
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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Privacy
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Fake passport, fake id card, employees at a selling point activating a bunch with junk data and selling those themselves.
Reading the article, I don't think they're trying to imply what is suggested by the headline, ie. that the real-name registration system is being abused somehow to scam people.
Rather it's an article pointing out that the real-name registration system did not help to combat the already rising number of scams, which was the reason that the government gave for passing the law.
It doesn't seem to be phone-specific either:
Hong Kong has seen a sharp increase in overall scam-related crime figures in recent years. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of scams reported to police almost tripled.
It's a useful data point to argue against any similar initiatives in other countries, where they may use the same reasoning to justify the law. It doesn't seem to make a difference, as criminals will always find a way regardless of the hoops that you make law-abiding citizens jump through.
Yeah these are the real problem, and I suspect the network operators know they’re there and could stop them.
https://www.wired.com/story/sim-farm-new-york-threatened-us-infrastructure-feds-say/
More likely Jane registers a SIM using her ID. She then sells it to Sally, who uses it to scam people online.
That would be my reading of that sentence. I’m just not clear if they propose to criminalise both Jane‘s and Sally‘s acts.
There have been a few studies that say scams, discrimination, racism and bullying will increase when people are forced to use their real name. In this case it's probably because off a different reason, but still.
That’s interesting. Can you link some of the studies?
Shark Attacks are closely related to ice cream sales:
https://www.statology.org/correlation-does-not-imply-causation-examples/
Just wanted to go through the data and see if they didn’t do a statistical stunt
I would love to live in a world where banning sharks would make everyone stop buying ice cream
https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/hicss/2012/06149194/12OmNyKJiDq doesn't support my claim since on the aggregate level it's reduced and on individual level it remains the same. But to not be too biased (by my own claim), thought it was worthwhile to post it. They do say here that it only reduced malicious comments by 0.9% (so it didn't increase).
Here it says it doesn't help.
This article says discrimination increases, but I can't find the original source.
They say real names are better then full anonimity, but worse then pseudonimity.
But searching for the right study, I can't seem to find it. Only news articles claiming it, but that's not much of a study. So maybe I shouldn't have said it increases, but it doesn't decrease (depending on which study and which aggregate level you look at). A lot of articles point at facebook where people need to use their real name but still post a lot of unfriendly stuff.
Thanks. It did seem weird. I would assume right-wing and “patriots” would react to foreign names. So it would increase things like scams, doxxing, bullying but for the victims.
Welcome to (most of) Europe, we have this bullshit for a long time.