Four local residents aged between 35 and 70 were cheated out of 100,840 patacas in total by a woman and two men purporting to be employees of a waterproofing contractor in the mainland, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Leng Kam Lon said in a special press conference yesterday, pointing out that the mainland trio entered Macau on Saturday at the behest of a mainland criminal gang.
Leng noted that the genuine company has never done any work in Macau.
According to Leng, the trio fraudulently used the name of a mainland waterproofing contractor on a social media platform, claiming to be professionals in solving the problem of water leakage in homes in Macau and Hong Kong. Whenever residents made enquiries about the waterproofing solutions via the social media platform, Leng added, “professionals” would be sent to their homes, pretending to conduct relevant tests and claiming that the water leakage problem could be solved by one catty of waterproofing materials at a price ranging between 688 patacas and 988 patacas. However, Leng said, after the process was done, the “professionals” would tell their victims that due to serious leakage problems, they had injected more than 70 catties of the materials, costing 50,000 patacas.
One market catty (斤) equals 500 grammes in the mainland. In Hong Kong and Macau, one catty (pronounced “gan” in Cantonese) traditionally equals 604.78982 gramsme.
Upon receiving a report from a male victim about a loss of 40,000 patacas in a home improvement scam on Sunday, PJ officers identified the female surnamed Zhang and males surnamed Li and Ge as the suspects and arrested them separately in a casino in the city centre and at the Barrier Gate border checkpoint on Tuesday, Leng noted.
In the course of the PJ investigation, Leng said, another two males and one female were also confirmed to be victims of the scam, who later reported losses of about 23,000 patacas, 30,000 patacas and 13,000 patacas respectively.
Under questioning, according to Leng, the three suspects claimed to have been “instructed” by a mainland criminal gang to commit crimes in Macau, adding that they transferred 70 percent of each of the proceeds they defrauded from the four victims on Saturday and Sunday to the gang’s kingpins, while the remaining 30 percent of the ill-gotten gains were shared equally among themselves.
Leng quoted a representative of a local anti-seepage and water leakage engineering company as pointing out that the two waterproof materials claimed by the suspects to be worth more than 680 patacas per catty and 980 patacas per catty respectively cost only a few hundred yuan each, adding that the method the suspects used cannot prevent any further leakage.
The 40-year-old Zhang, the 33-year-old Li and the 39-year-old Ge were transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) yesterday, facing charges of organised crime and fraud involving a considerably large amount of money.
Meanwhile, Leng urged those who suspect they were victims of the scam to report their case to the police as soon as possible.
Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Leng Kam Lon, accompanied by an unnamed PJ investigator, poses during yesterday’s special press conference at the PJ headquarters in Zape, with evidence seized from the three mainland fraud suspects, such as pataca banknotes and a number of tools for “waterproofing” solutions, being displayed. – Photo: Yuki Lei
