A local man was arrested on Thursday for cheating a man out of HK$100,000 in a scam involving concert tickets, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Mark Sou Sio Keong said at a regular press conference on Monday.
The 36-year-old local suspect surnamed Kuok told the police that he is self-employed.
According to Sou, a 30-year-old local man, who is involved in the tourism industry, reported to the police on November 2 last year that he had been cheated out of HK$100,000 by a man who claimed that he was a shareholder of an entertainment production company. The victim told the police that he got to know the suspect through a friend in early 2019. The suspect told the victim that he was organising a concert by a famous Hong Kong celebrity to be held in early 2020, and he was able to purchase concert tickets at a low price, and sell them at the ticket price to earn the difference. The suspect persuaded the victim to “invest” and buy some ticket who then subsequently gave Kuok HK$150,000 in cash in late 2019. The victim said that he later heard from a public source that the concert had been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and asked Kuok to give him back the money. The victim told the police that he had only received HK$50,000 from Kuok so far so he decided to report the case to the police.
The Judiciary Police discovered that Kuok had fled to the mainland and he was arrested when he re-entered Macau on Thursday via the Zhuhai-Macau Cross-Border Industrial Zone checkpoint. Under questioning, Kuok denied committing the crime and claimed that this “investment” of concert tickets was his personal business and he had given the HK$150,000 to someone in the mainland to buy the tickets. However, Kuok was unable to provide any evidence of where the money had gone. The Judiciary Police are following up on the case to trace the whereabouts of the ill gotten money, Sou said.
Kuok has been transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP), facing a fraud charge involving a considerable amount, officially defined as exceeding 150,000 patacas, according to Sou.
Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Mark Sou Sio Keong poses during a regular press conference at the PJ headquarters on Monday. Photo: Camy Tam
