From Boingboing:
We’re a small, independent television production company in Hong Kong… last week, a group of con men ripped off a load of very expensive professional tv gear from us… cameras, tripods, a recording deck, wireless microphones… lots of stuff. They were posing as a Portuguese production company… very professional-seeming. They even shot footage of Hong Kong with our crew for two days before they did a runner with the gear! At any rate, we got a photograph of one of them, who for some reason thought it would be okay to pose for a tourist snapshot CARRYING THE CAMERA HE WAS ABOUT TO STEAL.
The victims of the scam are Hong Kong based production company APV, (see their website for details about the perpetrators of the production equipment theft, including a high resolution version of the image reproduced above, and a scan of one of the con men’s name cards).
The con artists might end up trying to scam another company in China, or sell the gear on the Mainland, so beware of people wanting, renting or selling production gear, particularly HD cameras. The cameras stolen from APV were DigiBetas, not HD, but according to Christpoher Slaughter of APV, “they were definitely looking for HD rigs at first.”
If you have any information about the con men, APV’s contact information is here.
Being a production company has its advantages when dealing with scams like this: APV have produced a short video about the scam, and put it on Youtube.
Youtube URL for this video: Lusa Producoes are thieves