Taiwan Mobile must complete its recall of its Amazing A32 smartphones within two months and pay compensation to customers who purchased them or were affected by a malware problem that led to identity theft complaints, the National Communications Commission (NCC) said yesterday, one week after it had ordered the telecom to recall all of the self-branded, China-made smartphones still in use over the security glitch.
It also ordered the telecom to give it weekly updates on the progress of the recall.
The commission’s tougher stance came one day after the Consumers’ Foundation said that Taiwan Mobile should take full responsibility for the security breach and fix the loopholes immediately.
Photo: Yang Mien-chieh, Taipei Times
The foundation said that some Amazing A32 owners had filed complaints with it over the recall offer.
The Criminal Investigation Bureau informed the commission late last year that an investigation had found that Amazing A32 smartphones had been implanted with a malware at their manufacturing site, which enabled hackers to obtain the users’ telephone numbers and register with a mobile game apps without the subscribers’ knowledge.
Taiwan Mobile halted sales of the smartphone in July last year after selling about 90,000 units since the model’s launch in April 2018.
Only about 7,600 of Taiwan Mobile subscribers who bought the phones are still using them, the commission said last week.
The telecom had presented those subscribers with a compensation package, offering them a free software update, or the option to subscribe to a different service plan and receive a NT$1,000 rebate on a new smartphone and NT$1,000 deduction from their phone bills.
However, since some subscribers had already become the subject of scam investigations, the commission yesterday asked Taiwan Mobile to say how it would compensate fraud victims for money lost to scammers, as well as other expenses such as having to take days off from work if they were summoned by prosecutors’ offices for questioning.
“Users of the smartphone are still exposed to security risks. After reviewing how Samsung recalled Galaxy Note 7 for defective batteries in 2017 and Volkswagen recalled vehicles with compromised emission control systems in 2015, the commissioners ruled that the company should recall its Amazing A32 smartphones within two months and submit its recall plan to the commission,” NCC Vice Chairman Wong Po-tsung (翁柏宗) said.
“It should try to contact 80 percent of the smartphone users and recall 80 percent of the smartphones,” Wong said.
The company must also report the progress of its recall to the commission every seven days.
In addition, Taiwan Mobile must add a specific icon for the recall on its Web site, and should use every means possible to inform Amazing A32 owners about the recall, including sending text messages and making media announcements, the commission said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching