Police announced yesterday that they had cracked two fraud rings, one in Taichung and the other in Kaohsiung, and arrested 11 suspects who had been working for fugitives in China.
A spokesman for Wufeng police station in Taichung County said it arrested Ho Cheng-tsang (
Ho told police officers that being a crook is not easy, and complained that he had been robbed and wounded in June after withdrawing NT$800,000 of other people's money from an automatic teller machine.
Ho also said that he had been swindled by other crooks, on one occasion receiving 29 fake NT$1,000 bills in payment for bogus bank account details, giving the lie to the old adage that there is honor among thieves.
Despite his bad luck, however, Ho's group successfully cheated people out of more than NT$20 million (NT$610, 350) before he was caught and charged with fraud.
In Kaohsiung, police apprehended Chen Chia-teh (
Police said one of the victims had been duped into paying the ring more than NT$1 million.
The suspects worked with other ring members in China, whose job was to make threatening phone calls to prospective Taiwanese victims while the Taiwanese members, so-called "errand boys and girls," were responsible for collecting and transmitting the illicit gains.
Police investigators said an "errand boy" would get 2.8 percent of the haul. For example, if he collected and remitted NT$20 million per month, he would enjoy a "monthly income" of more than NT$500,000, with the rest of the NT$20 million pocketed by the ringleaders in China.
Police reminded the public to dial 165 for the anti-fraud hot line if they received suspicious phone calls.
National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology (NKUST) yesterday promised it would increase oversight of use of Chinese in course materials, following a social media outcry over instances of simplified Chinese characters being used, including in a final exam. People on Threads wrote that simplified Chinese characters were used on a final exam and in a textbook for a translation course at the university, while the business card of a professor bore the words: “Taiwan Province, China.” Photographs of the exam, the textbook and the business card were posted with the comments. NKUST said that other members of the faculty did not see
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