A local woman has cheated three former colleagues out of a total of 95,700 patacas on the pretext of raising funds for her daughter’s funeral and assisting them to rent a flat, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Ho Chan Nam said during a regular press conference yesterday.
The 43-year-old suspect, surnamed Chan who claimed she was jobless, was arrested on Tuesday when entering Macau via the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (HZMB) checkpoint.
The three victims – two mainland men and a local woman – reported their cases to the Judiciary Police separately on Sunday, with the first victim stating that Chan had defrauded him out of 42,000 patacas by claiming that she needed to borrow the amount of money to pay for her daughter’s funeral, while the other two victims said that they had both lost contact with Chan after they had transferred, respectively, HK$39,000 and HK$13,000 to her as the rental fees for a flat in Nape that she had purportedly rented for them.
According to a PJ investigation, Ho said, Chan’s daughter passed away in January this year, but by the time Chan borrowed money from the first victim, her daughter had already been buried and the money had been paid. The police also found that after receiving the money from the other two victims, Chan did not rent a flat for them.
Under questioning, Chan admitted to forging a fake chat history record to pretend to the first victim that she was asked by a “burial company” for funeral expenses, insisting that she had spent all the fraudulently obtained money.
Chan has been transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) charged with fraud involving a large sum of money and computer forgery.
