Four people have been arrested on charges of masterminding and conducting a sham marriage in order to obtain Macau residency, the Public Security Police Force (PSP) disclosed yesterday.
Similar to many previous cases, this case was referred for police investigations by the Identification Services Bureau (DSI).
The four suspects are surnamed Ji, 22; Huang, 29; Chan, 41 and Chong, 52. Ji and Chan are mother and daughter, while Huang and Zhong are mother and son.
Ji had applied for residency for her purported husband on the basis of marriage and reunion.
On Feb. 20, the police invited Huang and Chong for an interview, and intercepted Ji and Chan at the Border Gate Checkpoint on the same day.
Preliminary investigations revealed that in 2017, Huang’s family gave Ji’s family a sum of 40,000 Chinese yuan to resolve economic problems, which later turned out to be a fund to support Ji’s application for Macau residency in areas of accommodations and transportation, the police were told by the suspects.
It was also revealed that Ji’s father possessed Macau residency before 2017, and Ji only obtained the residency around 2017/2018.
To repay the goodwill, Ji’s family agreed to marry the daughter to Huang so that the latter could apply for Macau residency. The two young people had their marriage registered in August 2019.
Police investigations showed that the two had never lived “as a married couple” in either Macau or mainland China.
After the arrest, only Ji admitted to the offence. The remaining three people have denied the accusations, the police noted.
The police also disclosed that during the period when the couple was legally married, both of them had other partners. Ji had a boyfriend at the time she was arrested, and Huang told the police that he had broken up with his girlfriend.
Currency exchange scam
In another case, a physical confinement reported to the police was later discovered to be a currency exchange scam instead, the Judiciary Police (PJ) said.
The case was first referred to the PJ by the PSP on Feb. 23. The first report, made by a hotel’s security guards, led the PSP to identify the case as physical confinement. Further investigations have categorized it as a currency exchange scam.
A mainland man named Pan, 21, was arrested at a hotel in Cotai. Two mainland men were victims in the case.
Earlier that day, the two victims were gambling in a casino when they dug up a contact of an illicit currency exchange operator from their WeChat. They wanted to exchange some Chinese yuan for Hong Kong Dollars.
After negotiations, the two parties agreed to exchange 89,600 yuan for 100,000 dollars.
The operator referred them to another person, Pan, who asked them to meet at the food court at the hotel in Cotai, where Pan asked them to transfer the yuan to a designated account.
After the transfer, Pan started “counting money” in his backpack with extreme caution. The police added that they were told Pan tried to hide the cash from the sight of the two victims. After several attempts at counting, the two men could still not see the cash they were supposed to receive.
One of the two victims then grabbed two cash notes from Pan and discovered that they were film aids.
With their requests to get their money returned unanswered, the two victims started struggling with Pan and eventually alarmed security guards.
PJ investigators found 198 film aid cash notes in Pan’s backpack. Pan confessed that he was lured to earn 10,000 yuan in seven days by a criminal syndicate. He was told to exchange the film aid for real money in order to earn the income purportedly promised.
As Pan is under custody for further investigations, the two victims reported a loss of 89,600 yuan.
