While many of the nation's over 400,000 credit and cash cardholders remain dogged by escalating loans, a 27-year-old woman has made profits of more than NT$1 million (US$31,300) over the past three months using just her credit card.
However, this has raised the ire of her card issuer, Chinatrust Commercial Bank (中國信託), which decided to halt her card on Wednesday.
"If consumers refuse to follow the regulations [stipulated in contracts] when using our products, we're sorry but we have to invalidate their cards as we don't want to see them bearing high risks and distorting the nature of financial tools," said Michael Chang (張智銓), director of the bank's credit card division, during a phone interview yesterday evening.
"As of now, we haven't yet received any response from her. Nor has she contacted us for further negotiations," he added.
Chang refused to disclose the contents of a certified letter that the bank has sent to the woman, citing the Law for the Protection of Computer-managed Personal Information (電腦處理個人資料保護法).
Dubbed the "goddess of cards" by the local Chinese-language media, Yang Hui-ju (楊蕙如), a citizen of Taitung City and a MBA degree holder from the University of Queensland, Australia, stumbled upon the money-making scheme accidentally while surfing the Internet at home.
According to Yang, Eastern Home Shopping Network (東森得易購), the nation's largest television shopping service provider, allowed their members to purchase vouchers worth NT$20,000 (US$627.35) by paying only NT$19,000 when using a credit card.
What caught her eye was that, if the vouchers are not used after one year, Eastern Home Shopping will redeem them by presenting each customer with a check worth NT$20,000, a move that guarantees customers a five-percent return ratio, higher than the interest rate offered on deposits.
She then discovered a preferential bonus-point program provided by Chinatrust Commercial Bank, the nation's biggest credit-card issuer.
By paying a monthly membership fee of NT$800 to the bank, cardholders can earn eight times the amount of bonus points from purchases made using the card.
Having discovered the incentives, she raised capital of NT$6 million from her relatives and put it into her Chinatrust account in order to earn a higher credit line in October last year.
After spending all the money to buy Eastern Home Shopping vouchers using her credit card, she earned 1.6 million bonus points.
She then sold the vouchers on auction Web sites, some of them being bought back by her relatives, who then did the same for her. By doing so several times, her bonus points quickly snowballed to over 8 million points.
The points allowed her to obtain 20 free first-class airline tickets to the US, exchanging 320,000 points for each ticket, which she then sold on the Internet to rake in NT$900,000.
As Chinatrust also allows cardholders to transfer their bonus points, she sold her remaining points via the Internet by selling 1,000 points at NT$300.
This way, Yang said she has amassed more than NT$1 million in profit.
Chinatrust reportedly accused Yang of deception by colluding with her friends and relatives. But the non-profit Consumers' Foundation (消基會) said the bank should apologize to Yang and has no right to invalidate her credit cards.
The bank still profits from Yang's purchases by way of handling fees and if it finds her behavior improper, the bank should instead adjust the promotions, rather than accusing its consumers, said Terry Huang (黃怡騰), the foundation's secretary general.
"If it is OK for banks to make money from consumers, then why can't the reverse happen?" he asked.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
POWER BUILDUP: Powered by Nvidia’s B200 Blackwell chips, the data center would support MediaTek’s computing power demand and business growth, the company said Smartphone chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) data center with a maximum capacity of 45 megawatts to meet its rising demand for computing power required to develop new advanced chips for AI applications. The company has completed the first-phase computing power buildup at the data center in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼), providing 15 megawatts of capacity to support its research and development (R&D) capabilities, despite an industrywide shortage of key components, MediaTek said. Supply constraints have plagued a wide range of key components, including memory chips, solid-state drives, power supply units and central
TRANSITION: With the closure, the company would reorganize its Taiwanese unit to a sales and service-focused model, Bridgestone said Bridgestone Corp yesterday announced it would cease manufacturing operations at its tire plant in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口), affecting more than 500 workers. Bridgestone Taiwan Co (台灣普利司通) said in a statement that the decision was based on the Tokyo-based tire maker’s adjustments to its global operational strategy and long-term market development considerations. The Taiwanese unit would be reorganized as part of the closure, effective yesterday, and all related production activities would be concluded, the statement said. Under the plan, Bridgestone would continue to deepen its presence in the Taiwanese market, while transitioning to a sales and service-focused business model, it added. The Hsinchu
RSS