Crime | Anonymous complainant alerts police to illegal workers

Phone reports from citizens directly to the police or via Facebook led to the finding of several law offenders and subsequently to arrests, the Public Security Police Force (PSP) spokesperson said yesterday afternoon during a press conference.

In two different and unrelated cases reported by the PSP, reports from concerned citizens helped the force to act and to find the suspects of unlawful activities. In one case, authorities acted following the upload of a picture to a personal Facebook account.
In the first case, the PSP responded to a phone call from an unidentified source, who said that in a certain food and drinks establishment located at Rua de Hong Chau, in Taipa, there were people employed without legal authorization to work in the region.

After receiving the complaint on October 31, the PSP sent officers to the venue, where they found a man outside that was operating a food delivery motorcycle. When requested to show his documents to the police, the man provided a non-resident worker permit (commonly known as a blue card) and a driving license from Hong Kong.
The officers promptly noticed that the blue-card had a different job stated from the one the man was in fact performing. According to the PSP, the blue card stated “Kitchen Assistant.” Moreover, his driving license had not been registerd with the police in the region so it was considered that he was riding the delivery motorcycle illegally.

Further investigation uncovered a second man, a cook from the mainland, who did not possess any work permit but a safe conduct to visit Macau (travel permit).

The police also detained the individual responsible for the establishment, a man of 50 years from mainland China, on the accusation of facilitating illegal work.

In the second case, the police said they were alerted to an exhibitionist following the upload of a photo from a Facebook user showing a man seated on a motorcycle and displaying his genitals. According to the Facebook user, the situation was allegedly occurring in the Areia Preta district.

The PSP went to investigate and at around 8.30 p.m. on November 5, the officers spotted a man riding a motorcycle on Rua da Pérola Oriental that resembled the one in the photo. The officers followed him and when he left a food establishment nearby and was preparing to ride the motorcycle again they stopped and questioned him.

The man, a permanent resident of Macau, aged 47, admitted that he was the same person as in the photo but said he did not remember the incident as he was intoxicated. The police also found out that he did not possess a permit to ride the motorcycle and that according to him, the motorcycle was his brother-in-law’s.

He was accused of exhibitionism.

Mother and son involved in casino scam

Two local residents, a mother and her son, were involved in a swindle scheme that defrauded a Cotai casino some HKD900,000, the Judiciary Police (PJ) informed at a press conference.

The case started with a report from the casino’s security that informed the PJ that the son – a croupier and employee of the casino – had been illegally siphoning gaming chips to a woman that authorities later discovered was his mother.

According to the casino’s security team, which had been following the case for a while, there were two ways the duo were unlawfully obtaining credits. The first involved the woman being given more chips by her croupier son than she was entitled to for each winning play. The second occurred during the exchange of chips, when he would credit her with the double the amount she had traded in.

The security team collected evidence of 51 such incidents and calculated a combined loss of HKD130,000.

Last week the PJ organized a special surveillance unit to monitor the table where the man was working. On November 6 they were finally nabbed.

Questioned by the PJ, the suspects admitted the crimes and revealed surprisingly that the swindle, having started in July this year, had earned the duo around HKD900,000, more than six times what the casino had calculated.