More than 100 Taiwanese men have recently fallen victim to scams in which they give money to women who seduce them over the phone, police said.
The cases came to light after Kaohisung police and the Criminal Investigation Bureau last week arrested nine alleged members of a phone fraud ring, allegedly operated by a criminal syndicate headed by a man surnamed Liu (劉).
The syndicate was based in China, but has couriers to pick up money and female go-betweens in Taiwan, police said.
In many of the cases, victims believed a tragic story told to them by a woman on the phone, such as that they were destitute or had to pay big medical bills for sick family members, police said.
Once the victim has fallen for the story, they do what they can to help out their “newfound love,” including putting their houses up for collateral or taking out bank loans, the police added. However, the men end up with nothing but an empty bank account and, for many, a broken heart.
“Taiwanese men are easy prey for these phone sex scams,” a policeman said, shaking his head.
According to police reports, more than 100 people were taken advantage of in the phone sex scam, of which most were men over the age of 50, divorced, widowed, or who had little experience with relationships.
The police said the increasing number of men falling for such scams are desperately looking for love and are easily exploited by a charming woman who calls them several times a day and showers them with affection. Victims think they have found their “dream girl,” and many were willing to do everything for the object of their desire, police said.
Information from the police indicated a number of victims were duped out of more than NT$1 million (US$34,000) and that the majority of them were retired civil servants. One victim was a professor at a medical university in Taipei who, even after police had informed him of the scam, still would not believe the girl who had been his “mistress” for about six months was a member of a phone fraud gang, and he was still considering lending her more money, the police said.
However, Liu was quoted by the police as saying that it is becoming more difficult to entrap and gain the trust of these lonely men, adding that female syndicate agents often have to continuously engage their mark on the phone for months, or even a year, to successfully extract money from them.
For some men, talking on the phone was not enough and they would insist on meeting the girl for sex, to prove that they were really in love, Liu was quoted as saying, adding that the fraud ring was prepared for this eventuality and recruited girls willing to meet the victims to get a bigger payout.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching