A woman from Malaysia was arrested on Friday in a hotel room in the central district for assisting a telephone fraud gang in setting up GOIP* devices connected with a “call centre” set up by a scam gang offshore, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Lei Chi Wai from the I.T. and Telecommunications Coordination Division said during a special press conference on Saturday.
Lei identified the suspects as a 31-year-old woman surnamed Tan, who told police that she works as a ride-hailing platform driver.
According to Lei, between May12-16, the police received 38 similar cases in which the victims had received telephone calls from purported “customer service officers of payment platforms” through Alipay, who said that insurance policies on the platforms were due to expire and that they needed to pay 900 to 1,100 yuan to renew their policies, and at the same time falsely claimed to be able to assist the victims in cancelling the policies, so as to entice the victims into transferring money to another company by providing credit card information or scanning the QR code of the payment recipient, in order to obtain money by deception.
The victims were defrauded of between 3,000 and 170,000 patacas each, totalling more than 1.4 million patacas.
According to Lei, the police identified a hotel room in the central district as the location for the scam operation. On Friday evening, they took action and intercepted Tan in the room, and also seized eight GOIP devices, four of which were in operation.
Lei said that Tan admitted that she was paid by the gang to smuggle the equipment to Macau and to install it in the hotel room, so that members of the gang could use it to disguise telephone numbers from overseas as Macau telephone numbers through the internet. She also confessed that she was in charge of the day-to-day handling of the equipment, thus earning 5,000 Malaysian ringgit (9,400 patacas), Lei said.
Tan was transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) on Saturday, facing serious fraud, use of a computer device to simulate a mobile telecommunication service station, and criminal organisation charges, according to Lei.
* GOIP stands for “Global System for Mobile Communications Over Internet Protocol.” It is a device or technology that enables the routing of voice calls and SMS messages over the internet (VoIP) using Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) networks. – DeepSeek
A Judiciary Police (PJ) officer prepares a display of evidence before a special press conference at the PJ headquarters on Saturday about a local hotel guestroom-based phone scam den run by a female suspect from Malaysia. – Photo: Maria Cheang Ut Meng
