The Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) on Tuesday said it had called in a contractor to modify its sports venue booking system amid concerns scammers could exploit it.

People booking football pitches on the SmartPLAY app have to type in the English names of fellow players – a measure to prevent touting – but players' full Chinese names also automatically popped up.

Francis Fong, honorary president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, said such personal information could be misused.

"If there are scammers who know this trick, they will actually collect all these names and they can actually look up on the dark web about these citizens with their phone numbers or email addresses," he said.

"They can send a phishing link to [the users], asking them, for example, to pay HK$10 for the football field. Of course, they will enter into the phishing site, and it will ask you to fill in credit card numbers or even a one-time password. When you do that, you are not paying HK$10, but maybe HK$5,000."

Fong added that the authorities should look into having just one app, such as iAM Smart, for all government services.

Responding to media enquiries, the LCSD said it had asked the contractor to stop SmartPLAY from showing users' full Chinese names, and let users add their fellow players only after they have accepted a friend request.

When RTHK tried to book a football pitch on the system on Tuesday morning, it could still search users by their English names, but only their surname was shown, instead of the full name.

Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data Ada Chung said her office had not received any complaints regarding the issue, but it had reached out to relevant departments for follow-up work.