Investment scams have been popping up on dating and chat sites, with one man losing NT$4 million (US$127,971) after falling for someone he met online, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) warned yesterday.
A businessman surnamed Wang (王), 53, was befriended by an unknown woman on Facebook, bureau officials said, adding that the married Taipei resident began conversing with her daily after becoming enamored with her beautiful photograph.
“It was love at first sight with you,” she reportedly wrote to Wang. “I prefer a mature man with broad social experience.”
Wang continued the online relationship, believing it was true love, the officials said.
The woman told Wang that she worked in the Hong Kong financial sector and that she earned good money making foreign currency trades online, the officials said, adding that Wang wired an initial US$10,000 investment before he received small incremental profits that persuaded him to transfer more.
Wang withdrew the last of his bank savings, which he wired to the woman, only to receive a message from her a few days later that the trades were duds and all the money was lost, they said.
Wang tried to contact her, but when she disappeared, he realized that it was a scam and that he had lost NT$4 million, his entire life savings, they added.
Love traps designed to defraud people of money have been on the rise, with a 30 percent increase from 2017 to last year, the officials said, adding that many cases involved female scam artists claiming to work in Hong Kong or Macau as traders, bankers or lottery executives.
The scams are typically run on dating or chat sites, where the scammers befriend adults romantically, talk of easy profits and disappear after receiving a large sum of money, they said.
Officials warned the public to be careful on social media, saying that that the scam can entrap lonely women equally well.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching