Many people have received phone calls from scammers, especially in the past three years. Data compiled by the National Police Agency showed that the number of fraud cases has increased in the past five years, and since 2020 has risen to the top of all crime categories.
The annual number of fraud crimes increased from 62,000 to 130,000 over the past three years, surpassing drunk driving and drugs to become the most common type of crime, legal data showed.
In view of this, the Executive Yuan in July last year promulgated the Next-Generation Anti-Fraud Strategy Guidelines (新世代打擊詐欺策略行動綱領) and established a national fraud task force consisting of officials from the Ministry of the Interior, the National Communications Commission, the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) and the Ministry of Justice.
The Executive Yuan formulated its action strategies on the basis of four major tasks, namely identifying fraud through educational campaigns, preventing fraud on telecommunications networks, intercepting fraud by following money flows and capturing fraudsters through law enforcement.
It set the ultimate goals of preventing fraud, destroying the tools of fraud, blocking the flow of stolen money and cleaning up criminal groups.
However, these measures have so far not been as effective as the government had hoped.
Data from the prosecution reform group Saber Youth showed that in the past 15 years, about 200,000 people have either sold, maliciously provided or carelessly handed over their accounts or ATM cards, and about one-quarter of these people have done so on more than one occasion.
One of the key problems in fighting fraud is how to prevent the about 50,000 people who have aided and abetted criminals within the past five years from applying to open new accounts. This is crucial because dummy accounts play a major role in allowing scams to succeed and preventing investigators from tracing the sources of fraudulent activity.
The FSC is responsible for handling dummy accounts, but it has repeatedly been passive in its response. It says that this is because it needs to maintain a balance between “fighting fraud” and “inclusive finance.”
The FSC says that even people whose accounts have been placed on a watch list should still be allowed to open one or more restricted “salary transfer accounts” if they want to.
It says that if banks are supervised too strictly, it would cause them to deny certain people from opening accounts, which would be detrimental to the development of inclusive finance.
When it comes to repeat offenders, banks must at least impose some restrictions, such as not allowing them to open new accounts within three years, limiting the total number of accounts that they might have, limiting the amount of foreign funds they can deposit in their accounts, or restricting the functions of their accounts.
With regard to financial institutions that have a particularly high proportion of dummy accounts, the FSC should investigate them and hold them accountable.
After such measures have been in force for half a year, the FSC could observe whether fraud has decreased and whether the measures have had a detrimental effect on inclusive finance.
Furthermore, it would be easy for the FSC to conduct general reviews of dummy accounts that have been subject to investigations or convictions.
Police departments, for their part, should conduct sting operations and include them in methods that they use to crack fraud cases involving dummy accounts. After six months of implementation, such an approach might prove effective.
Jeng Shann-yinn is a professor in Kainan University’s Department of Law.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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