A Taichung woman appeared in court on Friday last week after allegedly booking a ticket with a “randomly” entered ID card number, unaware that the number was from a legitimate ID card owned by someone else.
The woman, surnamed Lu (呂), while attempting to purchase a train ticket to return to her home in Taichung, said she was worried about her personal information being stolen online and so she entered the ID number A123456789 instead of her own.
The transaction was successful, but she canceled the ticket purchase out of fear that the transaction would get her in trouble, she said.
Railway authorities, upon learning of the transaction, deemed it to be a violation of forgery laws and pressed charges against Lu, but the New Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office concluded that her actions did not constitute intent to commit a crime and decided not to indict her.
The owner of the ID number that Lu used, a man surnamed Hsieh (謝), was summoned to attend the court session where he expressed his frustration over the frequent, illegitimate use of his ID number by others.
Hsieh said that this misuse has resulted in him being investigated on many occasions by officials from the Bureau of National Health Insurance and other government divisions, as well as drawing the attention of the media.
Hsieh said that he had no desire to sue Lu, adding: “Could everyone please be careful not to cause me trouble like this again? Every time I am required to appear in court, I have to spend two to three hours traveling — it is quite tiring.”
Hsieh said he receives up to three or four summonses per month for various cases of fraud involving his ID number, and has even seen the number being used as a sample in a government promotional film for the new-format health insurance IC cards.
He said he has even come to be referred to jokingly as “straight brother,” in reference to the poker hand, adding that the convenience of an easily remembered ID number is not worth such hassle.
Lu said she had no intention of causing anyone grief, adding that she did not expect the transaction would succeed or that such a number actually belonged to anyone.
“I was just randomly entering numbers,” she said. “I did not mean to use another person’s ID number.”
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
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
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,