Mobile phone theft gets landlord in trouble

A theft of a mobile phone from a convenience store instigated an investigation with an unexpected outcome, the Public Security Police Force (PSP) reported during a press conference held yesterday.
The story started on the night of April 6 when a convenience store employee could not find his mobile phone in the shop and contacted the police.
Officers attended the call and went to the shop to verify the surveillance camera recordings, which showed two suspects who turned out to be two 30-year-old Mongolian men.
The next day, officers found a man with a similar appearance to one of the suspects, and intercepted him. During the investigation he was taken to the apartment where he lived, where the police officer found the other suspect from the recordings. In addition to that man, another man and a group of four women were found living in the house, all from Mongolia.
A further search of the apartment found clothes amongst the men’s possessions that matched the ones in the video of the theft. This discovery led the suspect to admit his guilt in the theft case.
However, in an unexpected twist, the case did not finish with the confession of the two men. The search of the apartment revealed many items in the room occupied by the four Mongolian women, including lots of clothing items, small jewelry and bijou items that were suspected to have been stolen by the women, as well as several tools used for theft including handbags lined with foil (to mask alarm triggers), a powerful magnet and 15 anti-theft alarm devices usually used by shops to protect their products.
When questioned by the police, two of the four women, aged 28 and 30, confessed to having stolen the items and being in possession of stolen goods. Even further, one of the women was discovered to have overstayed her visa.
The investigation revealed that the house was rented by a Chinese man to one of the Mongolian men, who was sub-renting it to his fellow Mongolian citizens at a daily rate of HKD300.
The two men and two women were formally charged with theft. One of the women was also charged with illegally remaining in the territory, and the landlord was charged with the crime of providing accommodation to an illegal person. The case was also referred to the Macau Government Tourism Office on suspicion of hosting illegal lodgers.