Two mainland students studying in local universities have fallen victim to a fake police scam in which they received calls from someone claiming to be from the law enforcement agencies in the mainland accusing them of involvement in mainland criminal activities and demanding the payment of “bail”, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Chan Wun Man said during a regular press conference on Monday.
Chan said that in the first case, a male victim in his twenties received a call on February 17 from a female claiming to be a staff member of a “courier company”. She said his package containing someone else’s ID and bank card had been seized by “mainland customs officers”. The call was then transferred to a “Shanghai police officer” who claimed that a credit card in the victim’s name was involved in a cross-border money laundering case for an amount of 2.3 million yuan (2.67 million patacas), which had caused an elderly man to “commit suicide” by jumping off a building.
The victim believed the story and transferred a total of 800,000 yuan to the scammer’s account as “bail” on February 22 and 23, after which the scammer demanded even more money, leading the victim to become suspicious and report the case to the police on Thursday.
In the other case, a female student in her twenties reported that she was defrauded out of 26,000 yuan. The police are investigating the two cases, but no one had been arrested at the time of the press conference.
