Local woman scammed MOP320,000 by alleged ‘British’ man

A local woman was reported to have lost MOP320,000 after allegedly being scammed by a self-identified British man over a messaging app, the Judiciary Police (PJ) announced yesterday.

At about 6 p.m. on June 4, the police received the report from the 33-year-old victim. According to her, in January last year she came across the so-called “British” man over a social app called “Shou.” They then continued their virtual interactions over Skype.

The police said the woman only identified their relationship as a friendship.

Later, on an unspecified date, the man told the woman he was planning to visit her in Macau, and asked for the woman’s address so he could mail some of his luggage in advance.

Afterwards, a supposed courier company contacted the woman and claimed to be holding mail addressed to her. She was told she would need to pay a fee to retrieve the mail.

Believing that it was true, she paid MOP17,000 through her mainland Chinese account to a designated mainland account held by the “courier.”

In February 2022, the victim received a Skype call from a woman who claimed to be the mother of the man. The “mother” told the victim she was ill and needed some money for treatment. She agreed to lend her some money, bought MOP240,000 worth of bitcoin and transferred this to the “mother.”

In June 2022, another man contacted the victim, claiming to be the lawyer of the “British” man. This “lawyer” said the man had been arrested on criminal charges. He said the man was therefore in need of some money to handle the matter.

The woman then bought several tens of thousands’ worth of bitcoin and transferred this to the “lawyer.”

Several days before she reported the case, she was contacted by another “lawyer,” who told her the man had passed away and left her a legacy. However, to obtain the inheritance, he advised that she needed to surrender her personal data and more money.

At this point, she had a feeling that she might have been scammed, so she reported the case to the police.

Yuu membership scams

In three other cases, people have potentially lost over MOP100,000 in fraudulent Yuu membership privilege redemption requests.

The three victims are a local man aged 41 years, a local woman aged 34 years and a local woman aged 49 years. They have reported suspicious transactions of HKD20,398, HKD40,796 and MOP32,200 respectively.

On June 3, they all independently received a text message claiming to be from Yuu, saying they had unredeemed privilege points in their account that would expire if they were not used.

All of the text messages came with a fake redemption link.

After clicking the link, the victims were presented with a redemption gift option page, on which they surrendered their credit card information after choosing the gifts they wanted to redeem.

They also surrendered the one-time password for the transaction they received from their respective banks.

The next day, they received text notifications from their banks, saying that their credit card had been used for some transactions. They each contacted their banks to inspect the transactions and freeze their cards. They all reported they had not used their cards for the said transactions.

According to the police, they will not have incurred any actual monetary loss for the time being, unless their banks do honor the alleged suspicious transactions.

This case was also reported to the police on June 4.