The Judiciary Police (PJ) and their counterparts in the mainland have jointly busted a cross-border fraud gang which used bogus banknotes in currency exchange scams, in which the mainland’s Public Security Bureau (PSB) arrested 26 members, including two male kingpins, while PJ officers nabbed 88 members and seized a total of 19,752 practice banknotes and 2,000 prop notes, according to a special press conference at the PJ headquarters yesterday.
Kou Peng Hong, who heads the PJ Economic Crimes Division Commercial Crime Section, announced during the press conference details of the joint operation carried out between January last year and April this year, noting that among the 26 mainlanders arrested by PSB officers in several provinces and cities in the mainland including Zhuhai in Guangdong, Nanning and Liuzhou in Guangxi and Shaoxing in Zhejiang, 21 of them – 20 males and a female, aged between 24 and 43, have been taken into pre-trial detention, while of the 88 mainland suspects – 55 males and 33 females – arrested by PJ officers, 65 have been remanded in custody, with the youngest aged about 16.
Kou identified the kingpins as two young men, surnamed Wei and Gong, from Guangxi.
According to yesterday’s press conference, the gang defrauded gamblers and other tourists who were in urgent need of exchanging currency by handing them counterfeit banknotes – 60 of which were practice banknotes and 10 were prop notes, totalling losses of about HK$18 million in 70 cases, between January last year and last month.
“The victims fell for the scams because they trusted the ‘currency exchange at preferential rate’ offers in WeChat groups and received the bogus banknotes after paying for the currency exchange through online transfer,” Kou said, noting that the gang recruited its members through WeChat groups and placed recruitment advertisements in the mainland by claiming that they could receive a “commission” of 30 percent for each currency exchange deal using fake banknotes, after which they were instructed to collect the bogus banknotes in Zhuhai and take them to Macau for the gang’s “currency exchange deals”. “No matter the transactions were successful or not, the gang’s kingpins got rid of the recruited members by cutting off all of their contacts so that they did not need to pay them any commission”, Kong added.
Kou pointed out that in every currency exchange deal, the fake banknotes with a face value of HK$1,000 and HK$500 handed over to the victims were wrapped in thick, white plastic, which intentionally obscured the words “practice banknotes” or “film and TV bank”, adding that the victims were all prevented from counting the cash on the spot.
Practice notes are generally similar in size, shape and colour to circulating banknotes and are used for training bank tellers, cashiers and staff at currency exchanges. Prop notes are used by film and TV producers. It is illegal to use practice and prop notes as legal tender.
Judiciary Police (PJ) officers display evidence they seized from illegal currency exchange dealers between January last year and this month, including HK$1,000 practice banknotes, during yesterday’s special press conference at the Judiciary Police (PJ) headquarters in Zape. – Photo: Yuki Lei
