Criminals are running sex advertisements on online gaming and chat sites and other social media targeting young people, and have ensnared 29 people in the past two weeks, police officials said on Sunday.
The Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said it has received hundreds of calls on its 165 “anti-fraud” hotline over the past month regarding such online scams.
Criminal groups see the summer vacation as a good time to target students and other young people, and are running ads featuring pictures of attractive young women offering dating and sexual services, CIB officials said.
Through online conversations, the scammers prompt people to provide their telephone numbers, home addresses, schools, or place of work, and then offer dating and sexual services with young women, they said.
After agreeing on a price, the victim pays by purchasing game credit points, which can be transferred via online transactions on game sites and social media and do not leave a cash payment trail that might attract police attention, the bureau said.
However, the victims said they never meet with any of the young women shown in the ads, and if they persist in asking questions, they receive telephone calls from someone purporting to be a gangster, who makes threats of violence, the officials said.
Using the personal information supplied by their victim, the scammers then blackmail their targets by threatening to go to the victim’s home, school or place of work to reveal that they paid for dating or sexual services, unless more money is paid.
CIB said one case involved a 22-year-old male university student in Taichung who linked up with a girl nicknamed “Hsin-yen” on an online chat site.
The student said their conversation led to Hsin-yen agreeing to go on a date and have sex for NT$3,000. The pair agreed to meet at a convenience store, and he supplied his personal information.
However, when the student showed up at the store, he received a telephone call from a man surnamed Chang (張), who told him to buy NT$30,000 of game credit points in order to verify his identity and to ensure he was not a police officer, the CIB report said.
After that, the student was asked to transfer more money via game credit points, allegedly first to keep Hsin-yen safe, but later it became blackmail, with threats to reveal the student’s activities to his family and school.
The student ended up paying the scammers a total of NT$160,000, CIB officials said.
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