Macau police Detain 113 Supposed of gaming-related usury

In a Thursday briefing, Macau’s Judiciary Police announced that earlier in the week, 113 people had been detained for allegedly being involved in a long-running loan sharking operation that allegedly targeted customers of the former Portuguese colony’s casinos.

Officers on Thursday reportedly communicated that the actions from town ’s police had seen more single-case arrests in town since the December 20, 1999 return to Chinese sovereignty.

Tuesday raids at 21 apartments “round the Cotai region ” motivated the arrests, according to police. Citing a press briefing by police, local Chinese-language news media reported that included among the items seized were jewelry and watches, loan slips, account books, HKD2 million in cash and gambling chips with a reported HKD100,000 face value, GGRAsia reports.

Known as usury under Macau legislation, the alleged loan sharking firm was allegedly viewed as being “highly-organized” and having featured “powerful procedures ” for dealing with police surveillance, as advised to the press from the Judiciary Police. The Macau police are of the mind that the operation could have been in existence since 2011.

It wasn’t until 2016, however, when police received intelligence regarding the matter, at which stage it initiated a series of investigations, said Fong Hou In, the mind of the wisdom and support department at the Judiciary Police.

Highly organized, the alleged loan sharking operation allegedly had a strict division of tasks delegated to its members, including the pursuit of bookkeeping purposes, identifying gamblers who had been potential creditors and issuing credits. According to the police, those gamblers who failed to repay their debts were confined illegally from the group.

The police believed that of the more than 100 people arrested, one was a Hong Kong resident and the surgery ’s ringleader, with nearly all of the members of their alleged loan sharking ring residents thought to become mainland China inhabitants.

During this time frame, 59 total cases of gaming-related suspected illegal detention were on record, a 43.8% decrease compared with the period the year before.