A total of 34 Taiwanese suspected of moving money for a fraud ring have been arrested in Taiwan and Thailand over the past five months in a joint police operation between the two countries, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said yesterday.
Since the beginning of the year, law enforcement authorities have detained 21 suspects in Taiwan and 13 in Thailand, CIB International Criminal Affairs Division Squadron Chief Yang Kuo-sung (楊國松) told a news conference.
The first-ever police collaboration between the two countries was in September last year, when Taiwanese suspected of transporting cash were caught by police in Thailand while waiting to get money from local ATMs, Yang said.
The high frequency of the crime by Taiwanese suspects drew the attention of Thai police, who asked Taiwanese police to cooperate through the CIB’s liaison office in Thailand, leading to this year’s arrests, Yang said.
Two people suspected of running the fraud ring, which allegedly used the mules to transfer pounds, were also apprehended in Kaohsiung on Thursday, Yang said.
Acting on a tip-off, police detained a 25-year-old man surnamed Huang (黃) and a 22-year-old man surnamed Lin (林) at the airport as they were preparing to fly to South Korea, he said.
The fraud ring allegedly led by Huang and Lin, both of whom have criminal records, is accused of having people pose as prosecutors to defraud more than 100 Thai nationals, but police have yet to tally how much they made, Yang said.
He said CIB officers seized computers, 13 cellphones, 22 credit cards and NT$1.73 million (US$57,773) in cash during a raid in Tainan.
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