Greed spurs fraud
Stories of Taiwanese being lured to Cambodia by fraud syndicates promising employment and high salaries, only to be carted off, imprisoned and abused by human trafficking rings on arrival, have captivated the attention of the public.
Similar cases occurred 10 years ago in Nanning, the capital of China’s Guangxi Province, which few Taiwanese have probably even heard of.
A friend of mine personally experienced this. The victims had heard through friends that there were investment opportunities in Nanning, and that they could make a lot of money. The moment they landed, their phones and passports were confiscated, and they were locked up with other poor souls. Gang members would then ask them how much money they had in their bank accounts and force them to remit their savings, and then the criminals would demand that they ask friends to also come to Nanning. The victims would weep and plead to get their passports back so they could return to Taiwan.
I have been a police officer for more than 10 years, and have had to deal with fraud gangs during that time. The root of the problem is always the same: greed. People have desires, they always want more and they quickly become blinded by greed. It is then that the fraud rings strike, exploiting the greed to relieve people of their money.
Preventing fraud rings cannot consist of sending police to airports to hold up warning placards, or of going door to door and telling people to be careful. Nor will a few arrests and confiscation of equipment deter them; fraud syndicates will simply recruit new members and start over.
If Taiwanese are not to fall victim to these schemes, they need to take responsibility for themselves, and if they hear of an opportunity to make big money they should think carefully, for if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Liu Kang-wei
Taipei
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past