Investors in Taipei yesterday accused Chinese-Malaysian businessman Ronald Aai, operator of the cryptocurrency wallet Cloud Token, of defrauding 1,000 Taiwanese out of NT$900 million (US$30.32 million) in an alleged financial scam.
At a media briefing yesterday, Taiwan People’s Party Legislator Ann Kao (高虹安) called for a judicial investigation into Cloud Token, saying that law enforcement authorities should arrest Aai if he is in Taiwan and detain any Taiwanese accomplices.
Kao, a former vice president at Hon Hai Technology Group’s Industrial Big Data Office, said that Aai came to Taiwan last year to conduct promotional seminars and recruit people to invest in Cloud Token, which he said was a “4.0 blockchain” wallet that could integrate all of the popular cryptocurrency assets.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
“Things like ‘blockchain’ and ‘Cloud Token’ sound like new ideas, but people looking to invest in them must really get to know how they work. It is not true that the purpose of AI [artificial intelligence] technology is to grow their investments,” Kao said.
One investor, who gave her name as Emily, said Aai promised that Cloud Token transactions were completely traceable, that 4.0 blockchain allowed people to deposit or withdraw funds at any time, and that cryptocurrency trading was very profitable.
Emily attended one of Aai’s seminars in July last year and, putting money into the scheme, received a Cloud Token SIM card, purportedly linked to her MasterCard account, for transactions.
She said that she initially earned a return of about 33 percent on her investment and that, by trading cryptocurrencies on Cloud Token, she earned vouchers for international travel packages, hotel accommodations and goods at department stores, which persuaded her to increase her investment up to NT$1 million, and to encourage friends and family to sign up.
“However, starting in October last year, Cloud Token was no longer handing out bonuses, or vacation and hotel vouchers, and its employees in Taiwan were telling us to be patient, that there were delays because of the protests in Hong Kong and the COVID-19 pandemic,” Emily said.
“Then, early this year, Cloud Token suddenly stopped running any transactions and we could not access it — we realized it was a scam,” she added.
According to information from Bitcoin.com, Cloud Token was a multilevel marketing scheme, or Ponzi scheme, that touted its blockchain technology and online wallet for cryptocurrency trading to allegedly defraud investors.
Chinese authorities have over the past few months arrested 72 people in connection with the Cloud Token operation, whose operators are likely related to Plustoken, a similar Ponzi scheme, the Web site reported.
“Just like Plustoken, CTO [Cloud Token] promised 6-12 percent interest every month, as the project was initially founded by the project’s lead developer Ronald Aai and project manager Daniel Csokas from Singapore, and nearly every article describing the Cloud Token project shows that the scam was tightly connected to the Plustoken creators, then in June a report highlighted that the Cloud Token project had issues in Singapore so the MLM crypto scheme’s founders decided to relocate,” it added.
TRICKED INTO MOVING: Local governments in China do not offer any help, and Taiwanese there must compete with Chinese in an unfamiliar setting, a researcher said Beijing’s incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China are only intended to lure them across the Taiwan Strait, after which they receive no real support, an expert said on Sunday. Over the past few years, Beijing has been offering a number of incentives that “benefit Taiwanese in name, while benefiting China in reality,” a cross-strait affairs expert said on condition of anonymity. Strategies such as the “31 incentives” are intended to lure Taiwanese talent, capital and technology to help address China’s economic issues while also furthering its “united front” efforts, they said. Local governments in China do not offer much practical
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
PUBLIC POLL: More than half believe Chinese drills would make Taiwanese less willing to unify with China, while 36 percent said an invasion was highly unlikely Half of Taiwanese support independence, according to the results of a poll released yesterday by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, which also found that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) support rating fell by 7 percentage points. Fifty percent of respondents supported independence, 25.7 percent supported maintaining the “status quo” and 11.8 percent supported unification, while 12.1 percent had no opinion, did not know or refused to answer, the foundation said. Support for independence is the new mainstream opinion, regardless of which party is in power, foundation chairman Michael You (游盈隆) said. Insinuations that Taiwan wants to maintain the “status quo” are a fabrication that
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
RSS