Kaohsiung police said yesterday they have cracked a fraud ring involving a local family that had cooperated with Chinese criminals to deceive close to 1,000 people into paying them almost NT$100 million over the past few years.
The city's criminal police unit said they have arrested Tsai Ming-hsiao (蔡明孝) and eight others on charges of forgery and fraud and seized more than NT$1 million in cash, 15 mobile phones, six Easycards, 71 bank and postal office accounts, 90 cash cards, two personal computers, forged chops and drugs.
A police spokesman said the ring members sent letters in the name of Kaohsiung District Court prosecutors Lin Yung-fu (林永富) and Chung Chung-hsiao (鍾忠孝) warning the recipients that their bank accounts had been frozen.
The suspects also allegedly called parents in the name of their children's teachers, saying their kids had been kidnapped in school.
The mail recipients and parents were then induced into divulging the personal identification numbers of their cash cards and bank accounts to the suspects.
Ring leader Tsai would then ring up members to go to a certain ATM to withdraw the cash and deposit it into another account controlled by Tsai's Chinese counterpart named "Doggie."
Police said that most of the ring members belong to a family of "Taoists."
The suspects allegedly spent the day loitering around different Internet cafes to trap people with their bogus schemes and spent nights holding seance sessions for clients.
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
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) and Chunghwa Telecom yesterday confirmed that an international undersea cable near Keelung Harbor had been cut by a Chinese ship, the Shunxin-39, a freighter registered in Cameroon. Chunghwa Telecom said the cable had its own backup equipment, and the incident would not affect telecommunications within Taiwan. The CGA said it dispatched a ship under its first fleet after receiving word of the incident and located the Shunxin-39 7 nautical miles (13km) north of Yehliu (野柳) at about 4:40pm on Friday. The CGA demanded that the Shunxin-39 return to seas closer to Keelung Harbor for investigation over the
The Taipei City Government yesterday said contractors organizing its New Year’s Eve celebrations would be held responsible after a jumbo screen played a Beijing-ran television channel near the event’s end. An image showing China Central Television (CCTV) Channel 3 being displayed was posted on the social media platform Threads, sparking an outcry on the Internet over Beijing’s alleged political infiltration of the municipal government. A Taipei Department of Information and Tourism spokesman said event workers had made a “grave mistake” and that the Television Broadcasts Satellite (TVBS) group had the contract to operate the screens. The city would apply contractual penalties on TVBS
A new board game set against the backdrop of armed conflict around Taiwan is to be released next month, amid renewed threats from Beijing, inviting players to participate in an imaginary Chinese invasion 20 years from now. China has ramped up military activity close to Taiwan in the past few years, including massing naval forces around the nation. The game, titled 2045, tasks players with navigating the troubles of war using colorful action cards and role-playing as characters involved in operations 10 days before a fictional Chinese invasion of Taiwan. That includes members of the armed forces, Chinese sleeper agents and pro-China politicians
RSS