The Internet has many uses, including swindling unsuspecting surfers.
Yesterday, a 20-year-old woman from South Korea was arrested on fraud charges in Taipei County after allegedly swindling several "Internet lovers" earlier this year, police said.
The woman, an overseas Chinese identified as Kao Kuei-ying (
Then, after a having a few telephone conversations with the men, Kao allegedly swindled them out of money -- NT$10,000 to NT$60,000, depending on the case -- using various pretexts, police said. Kao asked her new "friends" if she could borrow money to buy a notebook computer, for example, or for a trip to Kenting, police said.
That was not the end of it, either.
Kao would then meet face-to-face with her victims, although she would go to the meetings posing as her own "niece" sent to pick up the cash, police said.
Kao was arrested at her residence in Tucheng City yesterday.
According to police, five men have already come forward to testify against Kao, including an intern from the National Taiwan University's School of Medicine, graduate students from National Chunghsing University and Yuan Ze University, a pharmacist and a businessman.
In one case, Kao posed as a graduate student of journalism from National Taiwan University moonlighting as a model. She then sent photographs of an attractive model to stand in for her in e-mail communications, police said.
Kao told her "Internet lovers" that she came from a wealthy family, with "two brothers who are lawyers and a sister who is a doctor," police said.
They suspect Kao may have been involved in more fraud cases. Officers from the Criminal Investigation Bureau yesterday expressed concern about increasing Internet crime rates as more and more people go on-line nationwide.
The number of people in Taiwan who use the Internet regularly is expected to reach five million by the end of this year, according to industry sources.
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