Twenty-six young people were arrested on Monday after authorities raided a house in Taoyuan, from which an alleged telecoms fraud operation was targeting Chinese.
The suspects were in custody awaiting questioning at the Keelung District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday.
The National Police Agency announced the arrests yesterday, saying the operation was led by a man surnamed Liu (劉), who hired young people to make calls to China.
Criminal Investigation Bureau officials said they had a three-story house in Taoyuan’s Lujhu District (蘆竹) under surveillance for some time.
Apart from Liu and a few others, officials said the people arrested were young — under 25 years old — with the exception of a 60-year-old man, who told investigators he was hired to cook three meals a day for everyone in the house.
Officials said Liu ran a tight operation with military-style discipline.
The young workers were not allowed to go out for three-month periods, which is why a cook was brought in to prepare meals, officials said.
When the authorities entered the house, Liu and others tried to destroy evidence by burning telephone conversation guidebooks and other documents in a wok, but officers doused the flames with water and retrieved most of the material, the bureau said.
Authorities said that documents seized from the house indicated at least five people in China had been targeted, who had been defrauded of about NT$10 million (US$309,224) among them.
They said the group had a database of potential targets in Xiamen, Shanghai, Suzhou and other Chinese cities.
Officials quoted Liu as saying: “Getting caught in China was a big concern; we would get a heavy punishment, so we transferred operations from China to Taiwan. It is safer for us here.”
The young people were taught to speak with Chinese accents, impersonating Chinese medical insurance, law enforcement or state prosecutor officials to threaten people with state investigation and instructing them to transfer money via ATMs, the bureau 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
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,
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