The Panchiao District Prosecutors' Office (板橋地檢署) yesterday said that three private-detective agencies had illegally tapped more than 3,000 Taipei and Taoyuan residents' phone conversations.
Under the order of Panchiao prosecutors and with search warrants from the Panchiao District Court, secret agents from the Bureau of Investigation raided the offices of the I-tung, Kuohua and Fayan private-detective agencies.
Agents discovered that the number of tapped phone lines by these three agencies exceeded 3,000. Victims included celebrities such as lawmakers, high-ranking police officers and TV anchors living in the Taipei and Taoyuan metropolitan areas.
According to the Ministry of Justice, the total number of phone lines being legally tapped by police and secret agents with authorized surveillance warrants is 500.
According to the prosecutors' office, the bureau's secret agents also discovered that employees of these three detective agencies first located the person they wanted to tap. Then, they illegally broke into the phone box at the building where the person lived and began to monitor and record each phone call made by the person.
They also discovered that these agencies' employees would dress up as Chunghwa Telecom (中華電信) workers and pretend that they were fixing the phone line switch box when they were actually installing monitoring equipment.
Prosecutors said that these agencies sold these taped phone conversations to individuals and groups such as media companies.
Panchiao District Prosecutors' Office spokesman Huang Po-ling (
"This is a privacy violation," Huang said. "We hope we can come up with an exact number of victims and lawbreakers."
The biggest illegal phone tap case in history was first investigated in April this year when an informant told prosecutors and accused police officers of working with private-detective agencies to trade individuals' private information for profits.
Prosecutors summoned former Miaoli County police officers Yeh Chung-ming (葉忠明) and Huang Chen-shan (黃禎山). After an investigative hearing, the court approved prosecutors' request to detain them for allegedly selling private information to detective agencies. The prosecutors said the two were able to obtain the information through their access to the National Police Administration's (警政署) profile information database.
The bureau's secret agents and prosecutors also began to investigate the three agencies, which allegedly bought private information from Yeh and Huang at the same time.
They discovered that in addition to buying private information from Yeh and Huang, these agencies illegally tapped phone lines for profit.
Huang left his police job prior to the case. Yeh was fired when the case was made public.
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