Many people have been surprised after finding that most mobile service providers charge a fee for calling the 165 anti-fraud hotline, with some saying they consider the fee fraudulent in itself.
People can call the 165 anti-fraud hotline from their cellphone or land line to report suspected fraudulent phone calls to the police. The central government launched a massive campaign to advertise the hotline.
However, what most people don’t know is that they may be charged a fee of around NT$3 per minute when they dial the 165 hotline if they make the call from their cellphones.
“I thought it would be free because it’s a service provided by the government to the people, and we already pay taxes to the government,” said Chien Ling-yuan (簡玲媛), a company manager. “It’s the government’s job to protect us from crimes. Why should we pay extra money when we report a case to the police?”
“Charging the fee is like a government-endorsed fraud,” she added.
Another woman living in Taipei County, Chu Ya-yu (朱雅玉) expressed a similar view.
Chu said that though she wasn’t sure if the 165 hotline is toll-free, she would naturally think that all government service hotlines are toll-free unless otherwise stated.
“The government repeatedly advertises the hotline, but never told us there’s a charge — isn’t this a fraud and an attempt to benefit mobile service providers?” she said.
Meanwhile, a 28-year-old man living in Taipei City, Yeh Yun-yin (葉雲印), also thought that the 165 hotline should be completely free of charge, because “when we report a case to the police, we’re doing our part to prevent others from becoming victims.”
Although Chunghwa Telecom is the only mobile service provider that does not charge for calls to the 165 hotline, its spokesman Shih Mu-piao (石木標) told the Taipei Times that most mobile service providers charge callers because 165 calls also take up network resources.
“From a business point of view, you can’t really say it’s wrong for businesses to charge the users,” Shih said.
He said some numbers such as the 110 police hotline and the 119 fire department hotline are toll-free because all mobile service providers agreed that they should not charge for life-saving hotlines.
Shih said Chunghwa Telecom makes 165 toll-free because the company considers it a way to fulfill its corporate social responsibility.
“Some other numbers, like Taipei and Kaohsiung City Governments’ 1999 service number, are toll-free because the city governments pay for them,” he said. “It looks like the only way to make the 165 hotline completely free of charge is to have the government pay for it.”
Asked about the charge, Criminal Investigation Bureau director-general Frank Chiu (邱豐光) said the National Police Agency had no plan to extend its budgets to cover the 165 hotline phone calls, but it is trying to negotiate with other mobile service providers to make the hotline toll-free for everyone.
“I’d say the negotiation is not easy, but we’re trying,” he said.
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,