Some 155 phone scams and 436 online scams in Macao were reported to police in the first half of the year, with victims losing a combined 95 million patacas.
TDM reports that incidents of scammers impersonating government officers were of particular concern. Fraudsters commonly pretend to be law enforcement officials and accuse their targets of wrongdoing.
In some cases, victims are even manipulated into defrauding others.
Cheong Un Hong, the head of the anti-fraud coordination centre of the Judiciary Police, told the public broadcaster that “Some victims are told they have to complete so-called special tasks to atone for their crimes.”
[See more: More fraud is being committed now than there was before the pandemic]
The tasks, he said, included printing bogus warrants and delivering them to various addresses.
Authorities said another prevalent form of scam was financial. Victims are conned into thinking they have made easy profits in bogus investment schemes, and thereby lured into investing increasingly higher sums.
The scams are often disguised as online investment tutorials, Cheong said, and are advertised on social media platforms with fake celebrity endorsements.
Cheong told TDM that law enforcement officials were stepping up cooperation with local banks in order to stop suspicious transactions. He said that such measures had thwarted the transfer of some 78 million patacas to scammers in the first six months of 2023.
