A casino in Cotai was cheated on Saturday by five mainlanders – a female and four males –who gambled with 24 fake gaming chips worth HK$50,000 each, incurring a total loss of HK$1.2 million, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Lei Chi Hou said yesterday.
Lei said during a special press conference that upon receiving a report from the casino at about 11 p.m. on Saturday that its security guards had caught several gamblers using fake chips earlier that day, PJ officers arrested the female suspect surnamed Li and two male suspects surnamed Tao and Huang at the scene. Lei added that the officers later arrested the other male suspects surnamed Fan and Yang at a hotel lobby and in a guestroom in Cotai respectively.
A PJ investigation showed that Li, 37, Tao, 34, Huang, 34, Fan, 34, and Yang, 27, entered the casino on Saturday together with other suspects who were still at large at the time of the press conference, during which Li, Tao and Huang gambled with the fake chips in an attempt to obtain genuine chips, while Fan, Yang and several of their accomplices acted as the trio’s lookouts.
In the operation, according to Lei, PJ officers found 108 real cash chips on Li and recovered from the casino the 24 counterfeit casino chips of an “extremely high degree” of imitation. The 24 fake casino chips were discovered by an on-duty casino dealer during routine checks of the chips in a bead plate earlier that day.
Under questioning, the five jobless suspects told the police that they had entered Macau group by group since the middle of this month, Lei said, adding that apart from Yang, who claimed that he had entered the casino together with Tao and Huang by chance and had not been aware of the fake chips, the other four suspects admitted that they had received instructions from someone to “redeem” the fake chips in the casino, insisting that they had no idea about the bogus chips. The suspects told the police that each of them had been promised HK$10,000 as a “commission”.
Lei noted that Li was the suspected kingpin of the gang.
The five suspects were transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) yesterday, facing charges of organised crime and fraud involving a considerable amount of money.
The five hooded mainlanders suspected of defrauding a local casino with bogus chips are escorted by police officers in a vehicle in front of the Judiciary Police (PJ) headquarters in Zape. – Photo: Yuki Lei
