A local woman told the police on Saturday that she had been defrauded out of 670,000 patacas in an online gambling scam in September, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Ho Chan Nam said at a regular press conference on Monday.
According to Ho, the victim met a male netizen via WhatsApp in early September and they quickly became online friends. The man later introduced her to a new online gambling game where she needed to buy cryptocurrency to gamble.
The victim said that at first she won 3,000 patacas and successfully withdrew the money from the website. Afterwards, she was attracted by a website “event” which required her to deposit 14,706 cryptocurrency tokens.
After completing the “event” and attempting to withdraw the tokens, she was told by a “customer service staff” that she needed to deposit 51,832 tokens and 16,212 tokens for “account activation” and “tax service” respectively. The victim followed the instructions and deposited the tokens.
The victim still could not withdraw the tokens afterwards. Finally realising that she had been cheated, the victim reported the incident to the police, saying that she lost 82,750 cryptocurrency tokens, worth 670,000 patacas, Ho said.
