A dinner date Romeo who took lonely Hong Kong women for expensive meals and fled before the bills arrived was on Tuesday beginning a two month jail sentence.
Chow Wai-yip took the women for lavish dinners, then asked to use their cellphones to make a business call and fled shortly before the bill was due to arrive.
He ran up a $900 bill eating abalone, lobster and shark fin soup with a woman he wooed through an internet chat room in late February.
After feasting on the enormous spread, the jobless 29-year-old asked to borrow her cellphone, saying he had to make a call outside the restaurant, then fled.
Days later, Chow ran up a $650 bill when he took a 17-year-old schoolgirl out for a meal in the city’s upmarket Causeway Bay shopping district.
He used the same tactic, borrowing the girl’s cellphone to make a call outside and then fleeing, leaving her with the bill.
Chow was arrested March 7 when he returned to another branch of the same restaurant chain where he had ran up the $900 bill with another potential victim.
Staff had been alerted to the man and called police who arrested the suspect at his dinner table with a 35-year-old woman who told officers she met him over the internet the same day.
At a court case on Monday, Chow was jailed for two months after admitting five charges of stealing women’s cellphones worth $1 400. The court heard he later sold the cellphones. His lawyer told the court Chow committed the offences for ”purely economic reasons” after his father ran up huge gambling debts, leaving him to support his mother. – Sapa-DPA