A local woman reported to the Judiciary Police on Tuesday that she had been cheated out of 189,500 yuan (234,000 patacas) in an online scam, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokeswoman Lei Hon Nei said at a press conference yesterday.
According to Lei, the victim, who is in her thirties, told the police that in late June she met a male netizen on a social media app and they started chatting. The man told the victim that he’s Shanghainese but living in the United States. He claimed that he was currently stationed in Iraq on military service, keeping a lot of valuables. He told the victim that it was unsafe to keep the valuables in Iraq and asked the victim to keep them on his behalf. He said he would send her the valuables in a parcel.
Lei said someone who claimed to be an employee of a courier company contacted the victim via an app on July 1, asking the victim to provide her ID card number, address and contact number so that the parcel could be sent to her. The victim did so and on July 8 she was “notified” by the purported courier company staff that the parcel had arrived at Dubai airport, requiring her to pay a US$10,000 “customs clearance fee”. The victim transferred a total of 68,000 yuan via her smartphone to two bank accounts in the mainland. However, after the transfer, the victim received a “notice” from the courier company staff again that she had to pay another 210,000 yuan for “customs clearance services”, but the victim only paid 70,000 yuan. Afterwards, the “Shanghainese man” came up with different excuses, asking the victim to transfer more money, after which she remitted another 51,500 yuan.
According to Lei, as the victim never received the parcel and suspected that she had been defrauded, she finally decided to report the case to the police.
