The Taipei Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday charged a 65-year-old man surnamed Ko (柯) with embezzlement of lost property over money that he found on a hill in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖), which was part of a NT$83 million (US$2.59 million at current exchange rates) theft from First Commercial Bank ATMs by an international criminal ring.
Ko claimed that he had accidentally stumbled upon a bag containing NT$4.54 million in cash on a hill in Xihu Park on July 20 and later reported his find to police.
According to a Chinese-language media report, key evidence for the prosecution is that Ko allegedly returned to the hill with the apparent intention of taking home another bag in a nearby trash pile, which was allegedly hidden by a Lativian man, Andrejs Peregudovs, the key suspect in the ATM heist who was arrested on July 17 in Yilan County.
Photo: CNA
Judicial investigators took Peregudovs to the hill to reconstruct his route so that they could recover the money.
They only found one bag containing NT$12.63 million.
Peregudovs said another bag was missing.
As Ko was acting suspiciously, a passerby took a photograph of him on the hill, which later started circulating on the news, with investigators seeking to identify the man in the picture.
In yesterday’s indictment, Shilin prosecutors said that as it took 16 hours for Ko to report his find to the police, during that time there had been extensive news coverage of the Latvian suspect’s retrieval of the stolen money and the other missing bag, and Ko would have become aware that the money he had found was part of the heist.
Although Ko did go the police of his own volition and hand in the money, prosecutors charged Ko with embezzlement, because he had violated the law by keeping money connected with a criminal case.
The investigation took many months, as there had been some speculation that Ko had been working for the gang involved in the heist to recover the money.
However, judicial investigators said that they ruled out that possibility after going through Ko’s communication records and other evidence.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office in September charged the three foreign suspects — Peregudovs, a Romanian man named Mihail Colibaba, and a Moldovan man named Niklae Penkov — with fraud and offenses against computer security, and is seeking 12-year jail terms for the three.
During a trial hearing earlier this month, Peregudovs again apologized to Taiwanese for his involvement in the case, claiming that he was only a money collector acting under instructions and asking for permission to communicate with his family in Latvia.
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