A volunteer firefighter saved the blushes of a security company in Keelung on Sunday when he called police after three bags containing millions of NT dollars fell from the back of a van.
The three bags, containing NT$7.5 million (US$233,000), fell out the back of an armored car belonging to security company Group 4 Securicor (G4S) in the port city on Sunday.
The rear doors of the G4S truck were not properly closed and the three bags fell out of the truck at around 11am as it was making a turn, a 60-year-old witness said.
“It was raining so heavily that the driver did not hear when a taxi behind honked as the bags fell out and the truck continued on its way,” the witness said.
Ho Hsin (何忻), a delivery man who also serves as a volunteer firefighter, was on his scooter behind the truck. He stopped, picked up the bags and moved them to the side of the road.
He then stopped two police officers who were on their way back to their police station on scooters and together they took the bags of cash to the station.
Police officers contacted all the security firms in the area after putting the bags in the station’s safe and discovered that the bags belonged to G4S.
When the police contacted G4S, the truck had already returned to Taipei, oblivious about the incident. When informed, the company quickly dispatched employees to pick up the cash.
A G4S employee, who wished to remain anonymous, was shocked by the news.
“It’s impossible for something like this to happen and it has never happened before,” the employee said.
The police were also shocked, as armored cars usually have monitors and sensors that check the rear doors remain closed.
“You should be able to see in your rear mirror if the door is left open,” an officer said.
After an initial investigation, G4S said the incident happened most likely because of a mechanical failure and not human error.
Meanwhile, Ho may be entitled to 30 percent of the cash — around NT$2.2 million — as a reward for having found the lost cash and returning it to its owner, according to the Civil Code.
Ho said that he hadn’t thought about whether to ask for a reward from G4S.
A G4S manager, Liu Chien-hsin (劉建鑫), said that the company would check with police to make sure Ho was the person who found the bags.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,