Nearly 600 people, mostly Taiwanese and Chinese, were rounded up across Asia for suspected massive online fraud in a rare example of regional police coordination, officials said yesterday.
Taiwanese police said 598 suspects — 411 Taiwanese, 180 Chinese, three Thais, two South Koreans and one citizen each from Cambodia and Vietnam — were nabbed in a carefully planned operation involving law enforcers from half a dozen countries.
They were detained in Taiwan, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand on Thursday for allegedly running Internet and telephone scams mainly targeting Chinese, Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau said.
Photo: AFP
‘HEAVY BLOW’
“This will deal a heavy blow to the fraud rings and help substantially reduce fraud cases,” National Police Agency Director-General Wang Cho-chiun (王卓鈞) said.
“This was also the first time Taiwan and China police jointly investigated cases in a third country and we believe this will set an example in joint crime-fighting,” he told reporters.
Wang said police in Taiwan and China had investigated the rings for three months and conducted coordinated raids in 160 locations on Thursday.
Details of the scams are sketchy and appeared to have varied from country to country, but police believe thousands of people were taken in.
In Taiwan alone, more than 800 policemen were mobilized to arrest suspected local swindlers, with NT$1.33 million (US$46,000) in cash confiscated.
In Indonesia and Cambodia, 177 and 166 people respectively were held.
REPATRIATION
Criminal Investigation Bureau Commissioner Lin Teh-hua (林德華) said Indonesia and Cambodia had agreed to repatriate Taiwanese suspects to Taiwan.
As for Thailand and Malaysia, local authorities have jurisdiction over all cases that take place in their territories, he said.
Lin added that for this joint crime effort, China had promised in advance that suspects arrested in a third country would be repatriated to their home country.
The nationwide raids in Cambodia followed numerous complaints from victims, a police spokesman said, adding that the suspects had “many tricks” to extort funds.
In Malaysia, police on the island of Borneo arrested 27 Chinese and 10 Taiwanese for allegedly duping people into paying fake traffic fines, the official news agency Bernama and New Straits Times daily reported.
Police in Thailand said they had arrested four suspects, three Thais and one Taiwanese woman, in raids on seven locations in Bangkok based on information provided by Taiwanese police.
The element of surprise was key for the scam artists, Thai police said.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE
“The two main tricks are to surprise the victim, for instance by telling them they have won the lottery, or to frighten them by saying their bank account or credit card was suspended,” Colonel Phanthana Nutchanart said.
Taiwanese fraud rings have recently relocated to Southeast Asia after local police joined forces with their Chinese counterparts to bust their operations.
Jakarta police chief Sutarman, who goes by one name, said Chinese and Taiwanese had been arrested in 15 different locations in the Indonesian capital “following requests by Chinese and Taiwanese police.”
He said the suspects would rent houses with broadband access and make telephone calls over the Internet “to many victims in China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam in which they posed as an official to extort money.”
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