Authorities on Sunday cracked a prostitution ring operating in the Taipei area, with the investigation continuing yesterday as officials probed possible links to international human traffickers in China and East Europe.
According to National Immigration Agency (NIA) officials, the group used Line and other mobile phone messaging apps for soliciting, with the operation making tens of millions of New Taiwan dollars in profit in the past year.
Agency official Lin Chun- liang (林俊良) said that 18 people were arrested, including the two suspected leaders — 78-year-old Cheng Tsung-te (程崇德) and a 55-year-old woman surnamed Ku (顧).
Lin said the group is suspected of having ties to global human traffickers, with three brothers, led by the eldest, Wang Ming-hui (王明輝), handling the operation.
Calling it the largest prostitution ring in northern Taiwan, authorities said that Cheng and Ku leased offices in Taipei, where they set up a “client call center” and dispatched up to 100 sex workers on a busy day.
Police officials said Cheng is considered to be the “patriarch” of Taiwan’s underground sex trade with decades of insider experience. He has allegedly chosen Ku as his successor in the business.
The suspects were rounded up in a series of raids starting on Wednesday last week, culminating in Sunday’s arrests.
Lin said that investigators had placed the suspects under surveillance and found that Cheng had eight mobile phones, while Ku had 15, to receive calls from clients as well as issue instructions and dispatch workers.
Some of the alleged sex workers were Taiwanese, while the others came from China, Southeast Asia, Ukraine and other east Euorpean countries, Lin said.
Investigators said the Wang brothers had links to human-trafficking rings in China and other foreign countries, and were headquartered in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong to evade tracking by Taiwanese police.
“Our judicial agencies have made contact with their counterparts in China. The Wangs’ office in Guangdong was also raided last week, and several suspects were apprehended, including two Taiwanese nationals,” Lin said.
The suspects are to be charged with engaging in illegal sex trade, violations of the Human Trafficking Prevention Act (人口販運防制法) and other violations under the Criminal Code, Lin added.
NIA officials said that some of the alleged call girls were migrant workers from Southeast Asia who were under contract to work as home caregivers, but had run away before being recruited into the sex trade.
They cited deficiencies in administering and monitoring visa regulations for foreigners, as the suspects included Chinese women here on 15-day independent tourist visas.
A survey of young Taiwanese showed that only 36.5 percent of men and 19.6 percent of women believe marriage is important, a trend that academics say is key to the nation’s low birthrate. Yang Wen-shan (楊文山), an adjunct research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology, yesterday announced the 12th round of results from a longitudinal survey of attitudes among young Taiwanese toward markers of adulthood. While few of the respondents, who were aged 28 to 32 when surveyed in 2017, found marriage to be important, 95.8 percent believed that being responsible for oneself should take precedence, data showed. Economic independence came in
SHRINKING FEMALE POPULATION: Last year, 107.74 boys were born for every 100 girls in Taiwan, which is a greater gender imbalance than in Japan and South Korea The Ministry of the Interior recorded 9,601 births in January, the first time the nation has produced fewer than 10,000 newborns in a single month, while different indicators showed that Taiwan might also be facing a population with increasingly fewer births, women and marriages. It comes after the ministry reported a record low 165,249 births last year, which was lower than the 173,156 deaths recorded last year. The nation experienced negative population growth for the first time last year, ministry data found. The number of births in January also dropped from a year earlier, when there were 12,510 births. In February, there were
The Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office has listed six people as suspects in a judicial investigation into a fatal train crash on Friday last week. Fifty people were killed and more than 200 were injured when the Taroko Express No. 408 train slammed into a crane truck that had slid onto the tracks near the entrance of Cingshuei Tunnel (清水隧道) in Hualien’s Sioulin Township (秀林). The office also summoned six officials at the Taiwan Railways Administration’s (TRA) Hualien Engineering Section for questioning about alleged illegal business operations and unsafe work conditions by Yi Hsiang Industry Co and Tung Hsin Construction Co, the two
KEEPING FOCUSED: Premier Su Tseng-chang was said to have commended Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung, but said the tragedy takes priority Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) has submitted a verbal resignation in the wake of the Taroko Express No. 408 train crash two days ago, Executive Yuan spokesman Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) said yesterday. In a call, Lin told Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) that he wished to step down, to take responsibility for the deadliest accident involving a Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) train in 40 years. As of press time last night, the Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office had revised the death toll from 51, which had been reported on the previous day, to 50, after DNA testing showed that what had
RSS