The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday warned overseas Taiwanese in the US to be on high alert, as a large number of expatriates have received scam telephone calls made by people with Chinese accents pretending to be working for Taiwanese representative offices in the US.
Over the past few months, the nation’s representative offices in Washington, New York, Boston, Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Atlanta, Chicago and San Francisco have all reported cases to Taipei, ministry spokesman Andrew Lee (李憲章) said
Lee said the schemes predominantly come in two forms.
First, expatriates receive telephone calls from numbers that appear to originate from their regional representative office, demanding that they wire money to an account or face a lawsuit.
These calls are fraudsters using a caller ID spoofing function that displays a telephone number different from that of the phone from which the call was actually placed, Lee said.
Another scheme involves people speaking with a Chinese accent who call an expatriate’s telephone and try to obtain his or her private information by pretending to be staff working at a representative office, Lee said.
The representative offices have reported the scams to local police, who are investigating the cases, he said.
Most of the cases were reported last month, in particular in New York City, where the representative office reported receiving as many as 300 telephone calls from expatriates who received such calls on a single night, Lee added.
An increase in Taiwanese boats using China-made automatic identification systems (AIS) could confuse coast guards patrolling waters off Taiwan’s southwest coast and become a loophole in the national security system, sources familiar with the matter said yesterday. Taiwan ADIZ, a Facebook page created by enthusiasts who monitor Chinese military activities in airspace and waters off Taiwan’s southwest coast, on Saturday identified what seemed to be a Chinese cargo container ship near Penghu County. The Coast Guard Administration went to the location after receiving the tip and found that it was a Taiwanese yacht, which had a Chinese AIS installed. Similar instances had also
GOOD DIPLOMACY: The KMT has maintained close contact with representative offices in Taiwan and had extended an invitation to Russia as well, the KMT said The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) would “appropriately handle” the fallout from an invitation it had extended to Russia’s representative to Taipei to attend its international banquet last month, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) said yesterday. US and EU representatives in Taiwan boycotted the event, and only later agreed to attend after the KMT rescinded its invitation to the Russian representative. The KMT has maintained long-term close contact with all representative offices and embassies in Taiwan, and had extended the invitation as a practice of good diplomacy, Chu said. “Some EU countries have expressed their opinions of Russia, and the KMT respects that,” he
VIGILANCE: The military is paying close attention to actions that might damage peace and stability in the region, the deputy minister of national defense said The People’s Republic of China (PRC) might consider initiating a hack on Taiwanese networks on May 20, the day of the inauguration ceremony of president-elect William Lai (賴清德), sources familiar with cross-strait issues said. While US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s statement of the US expectation “that all sides will conduct themselves with restraint and prudence in the period ahead” would prevent military actions by China, Beijing could still try to sabotage Taiwan’s inauguration ceremony, the source said. China might gain access to the video screens outside of the Presidential Office Building and display embarrassing messages from Beijing, such as congratulating Lai
Four China Coast Guard ships briefly sailed through prohibited waters near Kinmen County, Taipei said, urging Beijing to stop actions that endanger navigation safety. The Chinese ships entered waters south of Kinmen, 5km from the Chinese city of Xiamen, at about 3:30pm on Monday, the Coast Guard Administration said in a statement later the same day. The ships “sailed out of our prohibited and restricted waters” about an hour later, the agency said, urging Beijing to immediately stop “behavior that endangers navigation safety.” Ministry of National Defense spokesman Sun Li-fang (孫立方) yesterday told reporters that Taiwan would boost support to the Coast Guard