Crime | PJ detains two scam suspects at the border, one wanted since January 2019

The Judiciary Police (PJ), with the help of the Public Security Police Force (PSP), has detained two scam suspects at the Border Gate checkpoint. The two suspects are a 66-year-old man from the mainland who has been wanted since January 2019 and a 51-year-old woman from Hong Kong.
The announcement of the detentions was made yesterday during the regular joint press conference of the police forces, held at the PJ headquarters.
In the first case, which goes back to 2019, the suspect is accused of scamming a Vietnamese woman and 12 other people she represented, in a fake scheme of job hiring in the neighboring region of Hong Kong.
According to the victim, the man said he would able to place workers in the Hong Kong cleaning sector, earning a salary of about HKD18,000 per month.
He requested an initial payment of 4,000 patacas per person to process the workers’ cards.
The Vietnamese woman introduced 12 people to the suspect and they gave him a combined amount of 48,000 patacas. After that, she said she lost contact with him and filed a complaint with PJ on January 28, 2019.
The initial stages of the police investigation led them to realize the man left Macau in April 2018, which meant the investigation became idle.
On July 16, when the suspect tried to reenter Macau through the Border Gate checkpoint, he was detained by the immigration officers and handed to the PJ.
In a separate case, a Hong Kong woman was also arrested while reentering Macau at the same border point.
She became wanted by the PJ after a complaint from a 45-year-old man from the mainland who said that in June, he gave her a watch valued at 500,000 patacas as a guarantee for a loan. However, after she received the watch, he was unable to contact her.
After receiving the complaint, the PJ discovered the woman had left Macau on June 14 for the mainland. When she returned on July 15, she was apprehended and delivered to the police.
Taken into questioning, she confessed to having scammed the man, saying that she had pawned the watch at a local pawnshop for 66,000 patacas. She also said she used this money to repay a debt.