A court in Beijing on Friday sentenced 46 Taiwanese, who were deported from Spain in 2016, to up to 13 years in jail for their alleged involvement in telecom fraud.
The accused were charged with defrauding Chinese citizens in two separate cases, according to a bulletin posted on the Sina Weibo account of the Beijing Municipal High People’s Court.
In one of the cases, seven Taiwanese, including one surnamed Lu (盧), were sentenced to 10 to 13 years for defrauding residents in China from October 2016 to December 2016, the court said.
Lu’s 28 accomplices were given sentences ranging from four-and-a-half years to eight years in prison, the court said.
The group allegedly posed as police officers, prosecutors, judges and other government officials to deceive their victims into transferring money to a designated account.
The fraud ring swindled 4.4 million yuan (US$674,753) from 66 people, the court said.
In another case, 11 Taiwanese, led by a person surnamed Tsai (蔡), were given jail terms of five years to 10 years for similar crimes committed during the same period, the court said.
They defrauded 10 people in China and Hong Kong out of 3.2 million yuan using similar tactics, the court said.
The bulletin said that the rights of the accused had been fully protected during the trials.
The 46 accused were part of 237 telecom fraud suspects (218 of whom are Taiwanese) arrested by authorities in Madrid and Barcelona in 2016. They were all deported to China, despite Taipei’s opposition.
Among the Taiwanese deportees, 29 were sentenced to jail terms ranging from four-and-a-half years to 14 years by a Beijing court late last year.
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
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
DEEPER REVIEW: After receiving 19 hospital reports of suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health applied for an epidemiological investigation A buffet restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) is to be fined NT$3 million (US$91,233) after it remained opened despite an order to suspend operations following reports that 32 people had been treated for suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. The health department said it on Tuesday received reports from hospitals of people who had suspected food poisoning symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, after they ate at an INPARADISE (饗饗) branch in Breeze Xinyi on Sunday and Monday. As more than six people who ate at the restaurant sought medical treatment, the department ordered the
Taiwan plans to cull as many as 120,000 invasive green iguanas this year to curb the species’ impact on local farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture said. Chiu Kuo-hao (邱國皓), a section chief in the ministry’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, on Sunday said that green iguanas have been recorded across southern Taiwan and as far north as Taichung. Although there is no reliable data on the species’ total population in the country, it has been estimated to be about 200,000, he said. Chiu said about 70,000 iguanas were culled last year, including about 45,000 in Pingtung County, 12,000 in Tainan, 9,900 in
RSS