Taiwan and China have arrested a total of 122 people on charges of telephone fraud in the largest-ever joint police operation carried out by the two sides, Taiwanese law enforcement officials said yesterday.
Together, the two sides mobilized more than 1,000 officers for raids launched simultaneously against a number of criminal groups in Taiwan and China on Monday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau said in a statement.
“The joint operation has set a new example for the two sides' efforts to crack down on crimes,” the bureau said, adding that Taiwanese police had arrested 66 suspects from various gangs, while their Chinese counterparts rounded up 56.
The arrests came as greater interaction between Taiwan and China has made illegal cooperation across the Taiwan Strait easier.
Criminals in Taiwan call people in China and trick their victims into revealing their ID and bank account numbers, which they then use to empty victims’ accounts, the bureau said.
Similarly, Chinese criminals target people in Taiwan, thinking the fraud is harder to detect than if they made domestic calls.
The bureau said criminal groups managed to con more than 1,300 people out of at least NT$1.5 billion (US$47 million).
It said Taiwanese police cracked down on 57 locations in 12 counties on Monday, seizing NT$60 million in addition to the 66 arrests. In China, police simultaneously struck thousands of locations in more than 20 provinces.
Taiwan and China signed an agreement in April last year to assist each other on judicial matters and cooperate in fighting crime. Since then, the two sides have held a series of meetings and discussions in which they agreed to work together on scams, as they are a major problem for both, the bureau said.
The two sides have together busted more than 60 scam rings operating across the Taiwan Strait, with more than 400 people arrested and about NT$10 billion in unlawful gains seized since the agreement went into effect last year.
The bureau said that compared with the more than 24,000 cases of scam and fraud involving some NT$7 billion in the first half of last year, about 20,000 cases involving NT$4 billion were reported in the same period this year, which shows that the situation remains serious.
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