The Judiciary Police (PJ) has confirmed that in 2024, it received five cases of local residents lured by criminal groups into scam jobs abroad.
Questioned by the media during the press conference that presented the results of the force last year, the PJ director, Sit Chong Meng, confirmed that five people had fallen victim to these scams that attract people to work abroad, offering high salaries for jobs that require no specialized or technical proficiency.
According to Sit, from these five victims, four were lured to alleged jobs in Taiwan, while the last one was caught in a similar scheme in Cambodia.
The information that the PJ collected until now noted that the four residents who went to Taiwan were lured into an alleged scheme of “transporting currency” and ended up involved with a fraudster group dedicated to performing scams in Taiwan.
The residents were allegedly forced to work for this group, acting as money collectors for the scams performed by the group.
According to Sit, they were eventually caught by the Taiwanese authorities and arrested for participating in criminal acts.
The PJ director added that from these, at least one is underage, 16 years old.
He said the local police are in contact with their Taiwanese counterparts, but not much information is available as their case is still under investigation.
As for the resident lured to Cambodia, the PJ said that upon his arrival, he was forced to work in a so-called “scam farm” performing telecommunication scams such as the ones that often target residents via SMS and phishing websites.
The PJ said that these people are chosen to enroll in the groups due to their high profile or contacts, being through them that the criminal group targets other people to fall victim to scams.
Sit said that according to what the PJ knew, he eventually managed to escape from the location where he was kept captive and contacted some friends in Hong Kong who notified the local police.
His whereabouts were not known with precision for some time due to the location and the fact that he had been hiding in different places.
The resident finally returned to Macau after the PJ solicited support from the Embassy of China to track him down and transport him back.
Sit also said that on January 8 this year, a resident called for help from the PJ after suspecting that a family member had been attracted to one of these scams, but the police managed to stop him in time.
He does not rule out the possibility of more cases of this kind being revealed in the upcoming weeks or months.
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