A man has been arrested in Hong Kong after making it rain cash on the street in an apparent cryptocurrency stunt.
On Friday afternoon, residents of one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods in Sham Shui Po district looked up to see hundreds of 100-HKD banknotes falling from the sky. Videos from the scene show a cheering crowd scrambling to pick up as many of the bills as they can.
In one video posted to the Facebook page Epoch Cryptocurrency, a man in a black hoodie is seen giving a speech to the camera before the money starts raining down, asking, “Does anyone believe that money can fall from the sky?”
It appears that the man in the black hoodie is Wong Ching-kit, a local cryptocurrency enthusiast and entrepreneur who owns the Epoch Cryptocurrency page, and is described as a “Bitcoin millionaire.” He is believed to be behind the stunt.
In a subsequent video post, Wong speaks from inside of a luxury car, describing himself as a kind of “god” who “steals from the rich and gives to the poor.”
On Sunday afternoon, Wong was arrested by police just ahead of another stunt in the city. He was detained as he was live-streaming and with a thick stack of cash in his hand, charged with “disorderly conduct in a public place.”
The stunts have certainly worked to give Wong publicity, though not all of it positive. Instead, other local cryptocurrency enthusiasts have accused Wong of essentially being a scam artist, having headed up a “pyramid-like scheme.”
He's not a Bitcoin Millionaire. He is running a pyramid-like scheme well known in the community. Disappointed this is getting so much uncritical attention https://t.co/FSguI7sSkm
— Leo Weese 獅草地 (@LeoAW) December 16, 2018
It’s not clear exactly how much money was dropped on the street. Police say that they only recovered 600 bills amounting to HKD 6,000, while a popular Twitter post claims, unreasonably, that “100’s of millions of HKD” was dropped from the rooftop.