A local woman was arrested last Saturday for cheating a mainlander out of 11.8 million yuan (14 million patacas), most of which has been gambled away by the suspect, Judiciary Police (PJ) spokesman Ho Chan Nam said at a regular press conference yesterday.
The 40-year-old jobless woman is surnamed Ng.
According to Ho, the male victim reported to the police on December 27 last year that he had been cheated by a local woman out of 11.8 million yuan. The man said that the woman had promised to assist him in exchanging yuan into HK$13 million. She also pledged, according to the victim, that after exchanging the money she would deposit the Hong Kong dollar amount into his VIP room account in a local casino.
The victim told the police that he is a businessman and that he started to work as a junket operator in 2017. The victim said that the suspect had assisted him six times in the past in exchanging yuan into Hong Kong dollars involving 15 million yuan in total. Each time, she deposited the Hong Kong dollars into his VIP account.
On December 11 of last year, the victim deposited 11.8 million yuan into 31 bank accounts of the suspect in the mainland to exchange the amount into HK$13 million. The victim discovered later that the suspect had not deposited any money into his VIP account. She told the victim that she had gambled most of the money away, after which she vanished. That’s when he decided to report the case to the police.
PJ officers discovered that Ng had deposited HK$13 million into her own VIP account on December 11 last year. Ng then withdrew HK$11 million which she gambled away. She subsequently withdrew the remaining HK$2 million in cash and left Macau in the early morning of the following day, according to Ho.
Ho said Ng was arrested last Saturday at the Taipa Ferry Terminal when she returned to Macau. Under questioning, Ng admitted that she had received 11.8 million yuan from the victim and that she did not deposit the HK$13 million into the victim’s VIP account. She falsely claimed, according to Ho, that the victim owned her eight million yuan.
Ng was transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) on Monday, facing an aggravated abuse of trust charge – involving a considerable amount of money – officially defined as exceeding 150,000 patacas, according to Ho.
