Police announced yesterday that they had cracked two fraud rings, one in Taichung and the other in Kaohsiung, and arrested 11 suspects who had been working for fugitives in China.
A spokesman for Wufeng police station in Taichung County said it arrested Ho Cheng-tsang (
Ho told police officers that being a crook is not easy, and complained that he had been robbed and wounded in June after withdrawing NT$800,000 of other people's money from an automatic teller machine.
Ho also said that he had been swindled by other crooks, on one occasion receiving 29 fake NT$1,000 bills in payment for bogus bank account details, giving the lie to the old adage that there is honor among thieves.
Despite his bad luck, however, Ho's group successfully cheated people out of more than NT$20 million (NT$610, 350) before he was caught and charged with fraud.
In Kaohsiung, police apprehended Chen Chia-teh (
Police said one of the victims had been duped into paying the ring more than NT$1 million.
The suspects worked with other ring members in China, whose job was to make threatening phone calls to prospective Taiwanese victims while the Taiwanese members, so-called "errand boys and girls," were responsible for collecting and transmitting the illicit gains.
Police investigators said an "errand boy" would get 2.8 percent of the haul. For example, if he collected and remitted NT$20 million per month, he would enjoy a "monthly income" of more than NT$500,000, with the rest of the NT$20 million pocketed by the ringleaders in China.
Police reminded the public to dial 165 for the anti-fraud hot line if they received suspicious phone calls.
Alain Robert, known as the "French Spider-Man," praised Alex Honnold as exceptionally well-prepared after the US climber completed a free solo ascent of Taipei 101 yesterday. Robert said Honnold's ascent of the 508m-tall skyscraper in just more than one-and-a-half hours without using safety ropes or equipment was a remarkable achievement. "This is my life," he said in an interview conducted in French, adding that he liked the feeling of being "on the edge of danger." The 63-year-old Frenchman climbed Taipei 101 using ropes in December 2004, taking about four hours to reach the top. On a one-to-10 scale of difficulty, Robert said Taipei 101
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US climber Alex Honnold left Taiwan this morning a day after completing a free-solo ascent of Taipei 101, a feat that drew cheers from onlookers and gained widespread international attention. Honnold yesterday scaled the 101-story skyscraper without a rope or safety harness. The climb — the highest urban free-solo ascent ever attempted — took just more than 90 minutes and was streamed live on Netflix. It was covered by major international news outlets including CNN, the New York Times, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal. As Honnold prepared to leave Taiwan today, he attracted a crowd when he and his wife, Sanni,
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