Chunghwa Telecom yesterday denied it had unwittingly disclosed client information to a company that provided it with fax machines, as police continued to investigate how criminals got hold of private data on more than 15 million people.
Yuanhsun Telecom, which sells fax machines, was suspected of colluding in stealing people's personal information with Yu Li International Marketing, which was discovered to have basic information on millions of Taiwanese that it sold to criminal gangs for use in scams.
In a raid on Yuanhsun on Thursday, police found that the company had been receiving faxes from its clients via an automatic forwarding function, which had been set using Yuanhsun's fax number.
Yuanhsun customer Chunghwa Telecom acknowledged that at least one of its fax machines had been set to automatically forward incoming faxes, but no client information had been leaked.
"The faxes that were forwarded to the Yuanhsun company were those that were sent to Chunghwa Telecom," Chunghwa spokesman Chang Feng-hsiung (
He said it was company practice to send important or private documents via secure e-mail or courier.
"We learned of this case in November last year. As soon as we found out, we checked all the fax machines in the company to be sure that no other machine was set to automatic forwarding," Chang said.
While Chang was unsure of how many Yuanhsun fax machines the company had bought, he said that there were about 30 in Chunghwa's northern branch offices. None of the other fax machines were found to be problematic, he said.
On April 20, agents from the Kaohsiung City Police and the Bureau of Investigation arrested a number of people at the Yu Li International Marketing Corp for illegally obtaining information on more than 15 million people from the nation's telecommunication companies and various financial institutions.
Based on data found at the scene, bureau agents on Thursday visited Yuanhsun's Yungho office with search warrants and discovered that confidential information from the bureau and other agencies had been sent to the company.
Investigations showed the information had come from Yuanhsun's customers.
All the fax machines the bureau had bought were set to "automatic forward" mode, and documents that went through the machines were duplicated and distributed to Yuanhsun's fax number.
"Nowadays, these kinds of machines have plenty of functions," said one agent, who requested anonymity.
"However, most people will not go through the manual carefully and will only take advantage of these machines' basic functions," the agent said. "In addition, the number was set to be the company's number. That made our suspicions stronger."
In addition to the confidential information regarding national security, the bureau's agents discovered that Chunghwa Telecom's customers had become victims of potential fraud cases. Agents discovered that Chunghwa had ordered nearly 1,000 fax machines of the same model from the company which it would sell on to its customers.
The bureau said that the investigation of Yuanhsun was continuing but that special agents had not discovered any further evidence on who at the company was involved.
additional reporting by Joy Su
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching