Police in Taoyuan said they have raided an illegal gambling ring that took bets on the result of next month’s presidential election, and detained four people for questioning.
Seized material suggests that the ring had total money flow of NT$250 million (US$8.3 million), they said.
A 53-year-old man surnamed Chen (陳), who is suspected of masterminding the ring, remained in police custody, they added.
Photo: Lee Jung-ping, Taipei Times
Chen had three employees and offered odds for people to bet on the number of votes President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) would get in the Jan. 11 elections, police said.
Tsai is seeking re-election, while Han is the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate.
“The raid was carried out at a location in Taoyuan’s Guanyin District (觀音) on Friday, in which computers, mobile phones, fax machines, ledgers, receipts and NT$20,000 in cash were seized,” Taoyuan Police Department Jhongli Police Station Chief Liu Yin-kong (劉印宮) said.
The suspects face charges of conducting illegal gambling activities under the Criminal Code, and breaches of the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法), Liu said.
Underground betting on election results is known to have affected election results in one-on-one races, Liu said.
Operators can entice people to bet on a certain candidate by offering favorable odds, which can skew the odds toward a higher payout, and is therefore considered a form of illegal vote-buying, Liu added.
In Chen’s case, people placed bets by telephone, fax or the Line messaging app, and each bet was set at NT$50,000, Liu said, adding that bidders used code words to bet on Tsai or Han.
Law enforcement agencies nationwide have been instructed to crack down on illegal betting on the election results and cut off such operations’ money flow, Liu added.
The authorities have promised to clean up such activities and prevent underground criminal syndicates from interfering in the election’s outcome, Liu said.
Separately, the Criminal Investigation Bureau last week said that from Dec. 10 to 13, it raided 24 illegal operations allowing people to bet on the election’s outcome, and arrested 30 people.
The arrests were part of an investigation into 694 cases of all forms of gambling nationwide.
Bureau officials said they seized NT$36.88 million during the raids.
Cases of illegal gambling on election outcomes are prosecuted under Article 104 of the act, which stipulates a punishment of up to five years in prison for “anyone who disseminates rumors or spreads falsehoods by text, picture, audio tape, video tape, speech or any other method” that results in a candidate losing or winning an election.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS