The National Immigration Agency (NIA) has conducted raids and questioned five people in connection with a suspected loan-sharking operation targeting Indonesian migrant workers, it said yesterday.
The agency in a statement said that a Taiwanese man surnamed Yang (楊) allegedly colluded with a Chinese-Indonesian woman surnamed Huang (黃) to run the loan-sharking business starting in 2020.
They are estimated to have reaped illegal profits totaling several million New Taiwan dollars by lending money to migrant workers at high interest rates, it said.
Photo courtesy of the NIA’s Chiayi County Specialized Operations Brigade
The raids were carried out last week by the agency’s Chiayi County Specialized Operations Brigade.
Five people were served summonses for their alleged involvement in the operations — Yang, his two daughters, Huang and her husband — the agency said.
Materials uncovered during the raids included NT$7 million (US$246,453) in cash, mobile phones, receipts, account ledgers and records of money transfers, brigade vice captain Lai Shu-yi (賴淑怡) said.
Brigade members also found 342 Indonesian passports, which likely belong to the victims, as the loan sharks allegedly confiscated the passports of debtors who could not pay back their loans, Lai said.
Seized materials and transaction records suggest that more than 700 Indonesians working across Taiwan had borrowed money from Yang and Huang over the past two years, Lai added.
The five face pending charges for alleged contraventions of the Banking Act (銀行法) and for operating an illegal banking and money lending business, along with the offense of “charging usurious interest rates when lending money to take advantage of individuals’ urgent need” as stipulated by Article 344 of the Criminal Code, Lai said.
Yang and Huang allegedly used social media advertisements that said “money lending made easy” in Bahasa Indonesia to target migrant workers in need of money, Lai said.
One of the advertisements allegedly promoted a loan of NT$20,000 that would be approved quickly, with an interest payment of NT$6,000 and a handling fee of NT$1,000 each month, which translates into an annual interest rate of about 120 to 152 percent, much higher than the 9 percent charged by private lending firms and the 3 percent annual interest charged by banks, Lai said.
“This loan-sharking operation took advantage of the issues and barriers facing migrant workers, such as not being able to understand Mandarin or read official documents, having no legal status and being unable to deal with Taiwanese banks... When they have urgent financial needs, they resort to lending operations known by fellow Indonesians,” Lai said.
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