There were about 25,000 fraud crimes in Taiwan last year, up 5 percent from 2020, and stolen funds totaled NT$5 billion (US$167.01 million), Criminal Investigation Bureau data showed.
The figures have continued to increase in the first half of this year, with 13,301 cases and stolen funds totaling NT$3.1 billion.
If the government cannot curb the trend, stolen funds could exceed NT$6 billion at the end of the year.
The bureau has been promoting “keyword filtering” to rein in telephone fraud, adding a second major measure to its 165 anti-fraud hotline.
Telefraud schemes such as investment scams pretending to offer services on behalf of financial institutions have become increasingly common.
A massive amount of such scams are using instant messaging services such as Line, Telegram or iMessage. In contrast to text message scams, the origins of the instant messaging scams that pop up on people’s smartphones almost every day are untraceable.
The bureau says it only intercepts about 6 percent of scams using instant messaging, showing that its fraud prevention tools are nearly useless in this field.
Even if the police manage to solve a case of instant messaging fraud, those who orchestrate and fund the scams behind the scenes usually go unpunished, as police can only seize the dummy accounts and mobile phones used, and punish those who provided them and collect the defrauded money.
Meanwhile, fraud groups constantly come up with new tricks, and when things go wrong and they get raided, only the groups’ foot soldiers are caught, mostly receiving light legal penalties.
The problem has become even more complex due to the rise of cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens and third-party payment services that allow anonymous transactions.
As it has not been clearly defined which law enforcement agency is in charge of investigating new types of fraud, victims do not know who to turn to. This makes it much more difficult for police to investigate fraud cases.
To prevent these crimes from happening, Taiwan should improve the public’s financial and legal literacy to reduce the number of potential victims. Better ways of dealing with the diversity of fraud schemes should also be explored.
This can hardly be resolved by a single agency. It would require coordination among agencies, including the Ministry of Justice, the National Communications Commission, the Financial Supervisory Commission and the National Police Agency.
They should integrate their anti-fraud resources and work with one another to fight telefraud.
Dino Wei is an information engineer.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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