A 21-year-old Hong Kong woman enrolled in a local university and two Hong Kong men were arrested by Macau’s Judiciary Police (PJ) and the Hong Kong Police Force respectively on Wednesday, PJ spokeswoman Lei Hon Nei said at a special press conference yesterday.
The Hong Kong woman surnamed Yu told the police that she studies at a university in Macau. The two Hong Kong suspects are a 68-year-old man surnamed Hung and a 27-year-old man surnamed Yan.
According to Lei, a local woman reported to the Judiciary Police on January 10 that she received a call on her smartphone on September 29 last year from someone who claimed to be a “bank staff” and asked if she had spent 18,000 yuan with her credit card in Beijing’s Chaoyang district. The victim denied it and the “bank staff” immediately forwarded the call to the “Public Security Bureau in Chaoyang district”. The local woman was then questioned by “police officers” and a “prosecutor”. They told the victim that she was involved in an illegal financing and money laundering case in the mainland.
Lei said that the victim was sceptical at the beginning but a woman claiming to be an official of Macau’s Commission Against Corruption” (CCAC) handed her an “arrest warrant” last October.
The “arrest warrant” contained the details of the crime, the victim’s personal data and a “Public Security Bureau certificate” as well as photos purporting to show officers investigating her case.
The gang then told the victim to use a new phone and download a “Security” app and input all her personal bank accounts details and passwords, after which the gang told her to wait for the “outcome of the investigation.”
However, the victim never received any results of the purported investigation.
It was only early this month that the victim finally told her family and a friend about the case, who told her that she might have fallen victim to a phone scam. The victim then tried to log into her account to check, but to no avail. She went to her bank where she discovered that HK$13.79 million in her accounts had been withdrawn so she immediately reported the case to the police.
According to Lei, the Judiciary Police followed up on the investigation and arranged with the bank to stop further payments from the victim’s accounts, preventing an additional HK$60,000 from being withdrawn. The Judiciary Police also requested their counterparts in Hong Kong to assist them in arresting the two suspects in Hong Kong.
Both (Hung and Yan) were arrested on Wednesday morning in Hong Kong for receiving the victim’s money in their Hong Kong bank accounts before transferring them to other accounts.
Yu was arrested on Wednesday afternoon near the Barrier Gate checkpoint. PJ officers took her back to her home in Taipa for a search and seized evidence such as several smartphones, a computer tablet, several ATM cards and a printer. Yu claimed that she was also a victim of a phone scam but had been unable to pay the “fine” so she assisted the mainland’s “Public Security Bureau officers” in arranging a printout of the “arrest warrant”, and then handing it to someone who, she claimed, was a CCAC official.
Yu told the police that she had received about HK$13,000 from the “mainland police” for her transportation costs, ranging from several hundred to more than a thousand Hong Kong dollars each time.
Lei said that PJ officers discovered the gang had transferred the victim’s money from six of her bank accounts to five of Yu’s local bank accounts, after which Yu made 25 transfers to four gang members’ bank accounts in Hong Kong. The officers discovered that the gang was also involved in five other fraud cases amounting to HK$870,000.
The six cases involved about HK$14.6 million. The Judiciary Police are continuing their investigation into the cases, such as looking for more suspects and the whereabouts of the ill-gotten money.
Yu was transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) yesterday, facing charges of fraud and money laundering, according to Lei.
The hooded Hong Kong fraud suspect who studies at a local university is escorted by Judiciary Police (PJ) officers from the PJ headquarters to a PJ vehicle in Zape yesterday. Photos: Camy Tam
Evidence seized from the fraud suspect such as a printer, a computer tablet, several smartphones and a forged arrest warrant is displayed at the Judiciary Police (PJ) headquarters yesterday.
