The Taipei Police Department yesterday unveiled its High Technology Crime Investigation Unit to tackle criminal activities involving the use of advanced technology.
“In July this year, the Taipei Police Department cracked the First Bank automated teller machine theft, which had drawn international attention. The fraud ring committed crimes throughout the world and ended up being arrested in Taipei,” Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said at the unit’s inauguration ceremony.
Statistics compiled by the police department showed that violent crimes have decreased over the years, while technological crimes have been on the rise, which is why Taipei Police Department Commissioner Chiu Feng-kuang (邱豐光) proposed creating the new unit as part of the Criminal Investigation Division, Ko said.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
The unit’s missions include equipping police officers with the skills to solve technological crimes, recruiting police officers with relavant work experience or academic background, as well as collaborating with academia to develop new technologies targeting cybercrime to ensure the police’s technological capacity is up to date with that of criminals, he said.
In addition to digital forensic tools and the global positioning system already in use when investigating technological crimes, the department would also tap big data to create a database recording criminal activities across the nation to forecast possible crimes, thereby outmaneuvering the criminals, the mayor said.
The unit, formerly known as the division’s “information office,” is not the first of its kind to be approved by the central government, but it has the largest staff and the most up-to-date forensic and investigative tools in the nation, the department said.
With the help of digital forensics, the division and the Taichung Investigation Bureau in September solved a nationwide malfunction of the YouBike public bicycle rental system after identifying the alleged suspect, it said.
A computer programmer surnamed Liao (廖), who works for a technology firm that designed the YouBike system, allegedly implanted malware that paralyzed rental stations in six cities and counties, reportedly as retaliation against his superior, who had scolded him shortly before the incident occurred.
Liao removed the malware after the alleged crime, but prosecutors and police said they located copies of it on his hard disk after sifting through 200,000 files.
Liao last week denied that he was involved in the case and was released on bail of NT$100,000.
He is to be questioned again by the Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office.
Additional reporting by CNA
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