Victim Defrauded of HK$81,000

Published on October 5th, 2016 5:58 am EST

According to an article in the South China Morning Post, four men are facing charges after being accused of running a scam in a poker game that was hosted in their hotel room.

According to the article, the four men tricked the victim into travelling to their town on the pretense of helping the victim find clients for his business. Once the victim had arrived, a friendly poker game was proposed, to which the victim agreed.

What the victim didn't know, however, is that the four men would be colluding to relieve him of his money. The scammers were using a combination of marked cards and special contact lenses to cheat the victim - one of the perpetrators wore contact lenses that allowed him to easily see the markings on the cards, and he would then signal to the rest of his conspirators as to what the victim was holding.

As you can imagine, the victim didn't stand a chance and quickly blew through any money that he had. The 10,000 yuan in cash that he brought quickly evaporated, as did the 60,000 yuan that the perpetrators granted as an IOU. In total, 70,000 yuan (which works out to about $10,492 USD) was lost by the victim.

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After losing so much money in such a short amount of time, the victim thought that something was wrong and complained to the police. At first, the victim thought that maybe he had been drugged - in actuality, however, the scam was much more complex, involving 30 sets of marked cards and a special pair of contact lenses. The four men were taken to jail and admitted to the crime.

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As we saw with the "superuser" scandals of the past, the perpetrators likely would have gotten away with the crime if they had done a better job of disguising their advantage. According to the victim, he didn't win one single hand over the course of his session at the hotel. He smelled a rat, complained to police and the scam was busted.

Source: SCMP.com - Chinese Fraud Suspects 'Use Contact Lenses to Spot Poker Player's Marked Cards and Dupe Him Out of 70,000 Yuan'

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Filed Under: Other Poker News