A 27-year-old civil servant – already involved in another scam case –borrowed 200,000 patacas from a friend and repaid him with a cheque that bounced when it was presented to the bank, a Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesperson said in a press conference yesterday.
The male civil servant is surnamed Wong.
According to the spokesperson, a man reported to the police last year that he had lent Wong 200,000 patacas earlier in the year. The man said that since the suspect never repaid him, Wong wrote a cheque for 200,000 patacas on May 16 last year to repay the debt.
However, when the man went to cash the cheque on May 20 last year, bank staff told him that the cheque couldn’t be processed because of insufficient money in the account.
The spokesperson said that the man then contacted Wong about the matter. Wong kept saying he was temporarily short of cash, and eventually the man lost contact with Wong, so the man reported the case to the police.
According to the spokesperson, after investigating, police officers found that Wong was involved in a large-scale fraud case in January, and has been ordered by the Public Prosecution Office (MP) to report to the police regularly, and on February 23 when Wong went to the police station he was detained. Under questioning, Wong admitted he had no money to pay his debts and had issued a cheque which he knew would bounce.
