Police in Kaohsiung announced the arrest of five suspects who allegedly belong to one of the nation’s major crime syndicates and used threats of kidnapping and violence to defraud their victims.
The five suspects were allegedly members of the Sun Chapter (太陽會) of the Heavenly Way Alliance, based in Taoyuan’s Jhongli District (中壢) and led by Tang Shih-hao (湯仕豪).
Although the operation was based at a tattoo shop and other nearby locations, most of the fraud victims were from Kaohsiung, police said.
After their arrest, the five suspects were transferred to the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office. They were charged with fraud and offenses under the Organized Crime Prevention Act (組織犯罪防制條例).
A local court yesterday approved Tang’s detention.
The group allegedly threatened victims over the telephone, saying that their sons or daughters were being held hostage because they had signed as guarantors for loans, police officials said.
They allegedly demanded that the victims pay right away by dropping the cash at a specified location, where it would be picked up by a person surnamed Chi (紀), who would then rush back to the group’s meeting point in Jhongli, the officials said.
At least four victims filed reports with the police, and they lost about NT$280,000 in total, officials said.
During the raid the five suspects were arrested, and police confiscated 1.81g of ketamine, along with 19 smoke flares, four metal baseball bats and two police truncheons, they added.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods