Teamwork nets elusive loan sharks
Meticulous teamwork by detectives of New Territories North Regional Crime Unit has succeeded in smashing a loan sharking syndicate which has been active in Tai Po and Tuen Mun.
Two men, aged 35 and 39, were arrested by NTN RCU Team 2B in June 2001, and were charged with 22 counts of lending money at an excessive interest rate and two counts of dealing with the proceeds of an indictable offence.
Following their trial and conviction at a District Court on May 14, they were jailed for 40 months and 42 months respectively following a request to the trial judge to impose a stiffer sentence in view of the severity of the crime.
It was the Force's first success in applying for an enhanced sentence on loan sharks.
NTN RCU Team 2B Senior Inspector, Ms Kwong Yim-chun, said the operation was time consuming and a very difficult task.
Ms Kwong explained: "We experienced difficulties in identifying the culprits because there were no face-to-face contacts between debtors and the culprits, as the former contacted the loan sharks through an advertised mobile phone number.
"To avoid being caught, all incoming calls to the loan sharks were directed to a paging centre providing secretarial service. This enabled the culprits to retrieve the messages left by the debtors by calling the paging centre instead of answering the calls directly.
"After our undercover officers succeeded in obtaining loans from the syndicate and getting an account number for repayment, efforts were spent in analysing the transaction record of the repayment account which eventually helped us to figure out the location where the culprits withdrew the repayment money and identify them."
"The culprits were very smart because they kept changing their repayment accounts. Following extensive investigations, we succeeded in identifying all their repayment accounts ," she said.
The suspects were eventually arrested and over 300 pieces of exhibits, including computer disks containing personal data of debtors and a quantity of automatic teller machine cards used by debtors to repay their debts, were seized.
One of the investigating officers, Police Constable Wu Man-wa, said: "With the assistance of the then Computer Crime Section of Commercial Crime Bureau, we were able to find out the hidden data in the computer disks. The data was later decoded and presented in court as evidence."
Station Sergeant Kong Chi-tim told OffBeat that another challenge they had to face was locating the debtors.
"Following their arrest, we needed to locate all the debtors and persuade them to give evidence as soon as possible," Mr Kong said.
Commenting on their success in applying for the imposition of an enhanced sentence on the loan sharks, Ms Kwong said: "We had been working closely with the Department of Justice and Director of Public Prosecutions throughout the operation. In fact, all the evidence presented in court, including debtors' evidence and over 300 pieces of exhibits, proved conclusively the seriousness of the crime committed by the syndicate and we were glad that the court accepted our argument."
Chief Inspector Wan Tat-wai highly praised his officers' professionalism, perseverance and team spirit in the operation.
"For loan sharking cases, evidence from debtors plays a very important role in bringing the loan sharks to justice and in this particular case, our officers had done a great job, especially in getting trust from the witnesses," Mr Wan said.
Success through teamwork