They did that on boarding on YYZ-HKG too.
I once was stopped when I was walking up the jetway. The agent wanted to count how much money I was carrying in my wallet! It was a relatively quick and easy job (I was not rich enough to carry anything even close to the upper limit of $10,000) but I saw a family with all their belongings spread on the floor when they wanted to search everything they carried.
Sometimes it was not a harmless exercise. Another time coming back from HKG, the little girl lining right in front of me fainted and fell on my lap after 14 hours of motion sickness and dehydration in the flight and standing in line in the hot and airless jetway. The agents disappeared right after this happened.