A man was falsely imprisoned by an illegal currency exchange gang at a hotel in Cotai in the wee hours of Saturday after he and his accomplice, had allegedly cheated a gang member out of HK$300,000, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Ho Wai Lok said during a special press conference yesterday.
The Judiciary Police received a referral about a false imprisonment and coercion case from the Public Security Police (PSP) on Saturday, Ho said, adding that a further PJ investigation identified the gang’s victim as a suspect related to a fraud case involving a relatively large amount of money.
A PJ investigation showed, according to Ho, that the fraudster surnamed Kim contacted a gang member surnamed Wang via WeChat, asking him to exchange yuan worth HK$300,000 at his accomplice’s guestroom in a hotel in Cotai. Ho added that after Wang handed over the money to Kim, he immediately left the room with the cash, leaving his accomplice surnamed Zheng to delay the yuan transfer to Wang’s bank account for purportedly different reasons.
Since Wang never received the transfer payment from the duo, he called his fellow members – two men surnamed Zou and Liu, as well as two women surnamed Ying and Zheng – to the room in order to collect the money from “their client” Zheng, Ho said, adding that Zheng was then stopped by the quintet from leaving the room and was threatened by Wang with a pair of scissors to sign an IOU.
The case was not reported to the police until Zheng’s relatives called the hotel security department for help, Ho said, adding that police officers “rescued” Zheng from the guestroom, and at the same time arrested the five gang members, all of whom admitted that they had falsely imprisoned Zheng because he had – allegedly – cheated them.
The Judiciary Police identified Kim and arrested him at a hotel guestroom in Zape at noon on Saturday for cheating Wang out of HK$300,000. In the operation, according to Ho, the police recovered HK$8,800 in cash from the room.
Under questioning, Zheng denied defrauding Wang, while Kim refused to reveal more details of the crime, including the whereabouts of Wang’s money.
According to Ho, all seven suspects in both cases are from the mainland, of whom Wang and Ying are overstayers in Macau, while Kim is an illegal immigrant. The seven suspects, who told the police that they are jobless, are aged between 29 and 44. All were transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) yesterday, facing their respective charges of fraud involving a considerably large amount of money, coercion, false imprisonment, possession of a prohibited weapon, and aiding and abetting an illegal immigrant.
The two hooded fraud suspects (left) and five hooded false imprisonment suspects, all of them from the mainland, are escorted by Judiciary Police (PJ) officers in separate batches from the PJ headquarters in Zape to a PJ vehicle yesterday.
– Photos: Yuki Lei
