A Taiwanese woman in Thailand on Sunday called New Taipei City (新北市) Police Department’s Ruifang Precinct to report a stolen MSN account and subsequent fraud.
Aged 27 and registered at an address in the Ruifang (瑞芳) area of New Taipei City, the Taiwanese woman surnamed Wu (吳) works and lives in Thailand.
STOLEN ACCOUNT
On Sunday morning, Wu logged off her MSN account. In the afternoon, when Wu could not log back in, she decided to call her elder sister, who works in Taiwan, and asked her to call the MSN Taiwan customer service branch to check and change her password.
At the same time, Wu received a call from a friend asking if she had asked him to buy some game points for her.
Puzzled, Wu called the Taiwan office and was informed that several people had been asked through her MSN account to buy game points.
“My friend was in the Taiwan office at the time and had been asked by my MSN account to buy two MyCard game-point cards worth about NT$6,000 and to tell [the con artist impersonating] ‘Wu’ the account and PIN for the card,” Wu said.
Wu said she did not turn to Thai authorities because she was a Taiwanese national and that Taiwanese police were highly efficient at solving such cases.
The Ruifang Precinct said this was the first time it received a call on the matter, adding it was confident the culprits would be found.
“Though we don’t have a precedent, we’re still accepting the case,” police said.
It said an investigation into login IPs and the authentication of game-point cards would likely lead them to the culprits.
Ruifang Precinct Cycbercrime Unit chief Lin Yi-cheng (林驛丞) said that even though cybercrime was not limited by national boundaries, jurisdiction over a cybercrime was usually determined primarily by the current address of the victim of the crime.
“In this case, although Wu lives in Thailand, the victim was her friend, who lives in Taiwan. Her lodging the case with Taiwanese police was the correct thing to do,” Lin said.
PREVENTION
Lin said prevention methods against cyber fraud included calling a person directly, not telling anyone else their MSN account and password, changing passwords on a regular basis and scanning for Trojan viruses.
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