Two men from the mainland have been arrested on suspicion of fraud involving pawning fake gold jewelry and a watch at local pawnshops, the Judiciary Police (PJ) announced yesterday morning during a special press conference.
According to the PJ, the two men are suspected of having committed the crimes on at least 10 different occasions since the start of 2022, with the force calculating the total amount defrauded as around HKD155,000.
The trades were all carried out in pawnshops around the Dynasty area in NAPE District.
The case started to unfold in October last year when one of the pawnshops reported having found a watch suspected to be counterfeit among their non-retrieved items.
Upon investigation, the PJ found that the watch was indeed a fake and, at the same time, they managed to identify the two suspects that had left some items at the store, including the watch.
While attempting to reenter Macau last Sunday (April 9), the two men were detained and interrogated.
During police questioning, the suspects said they had been hired by a group to perform the activity in Macau.
They said that the deal involved pawning the items for at least two or three times the value of the counterfeit products and returning to the mainland with the cash and the pawnshop ticket. For each successful pawning, they would receive RMB3,000 in compensation.
Following the investigation, the PJ said that, according to the findings, the criminal syndicate in charge of the crimes would resell the pawn tickets at a low price to other people on the mainland, claiming that they were original and valuable products.
The PJ noted that, in reality, the pawnshops involved did not sustain significant losses as most of the items had been retrieved from the shops by other people, who became the real victims in this case.
The PJ explained that the pawnshops were only used as an intermediary to generate credibility in the eyes of the final buyers that the products were real and valuable.
