A court in Beijing on Friday sentenced 46 Taiwanese, who were deported from Spain in 2016, to up to 13 years in jail for their alleged involvement in telecom fraud.
The accused were charged with defrauding Chinese citizens in two separate cases, according to a bulletin posted on the Sina Weibo account of the Beijing Municipal High People’s Court.
In one of the cases, seven Taiwanese, including one surnamed Lu (盧), were sentenced to 10 to 13 years for defrauding residents in China from October 2016 to December 2016, the court said.
Lu’s 28 accomplices were given sentences ranging from four-and-a-half years to eight years in prison, the court said.
The group allegedly posed as police officers, prosecutors, judges and other government officials to deceive their victims into transferring money to a designated account.
The fraud ring swindled 4.4 million yuan (US$674,753) from 66 people, the court said.
In another case, 11 Taiwanese, led by a person surnamed Tsai (蔡), were given jail terms of five years to 10 years for similar crimes committed during the same period, the court said.
They defrauded 10 people in China and Hong Kong out of 3.2 million yuan using similar tactics, the court said.
The bulletin said that the rights of the accused had been fully protected during the trials.
The 46 accused were part of 237 telecom fraud suspects (218 of whom are Taiwanese) arrested by authorities in Madrid and Barcelona in 2016. They were all deported to China, despite Taipei’s opposition.
Among the Taiwanese deportees, 29 were sentenced to jail terms ranging from four-and-a-half years to 14 years by a Beijing court late last year.
South Korean K-pop girl group Blackpink are to make Kaohsiung the first stop on their Asia tour when they perform at Kaohsiung National Stadium on Oct. 18 and 19, the event organizer said yesterday. The upcoming performances will also make Blackpink the first girl group ever to perform twice at the stadium. It will be the group’s third visit to Taiwan to stage a concert. The last time Blackpink held a concert in the city was in March 2023. Their first concert in Taiwan was on March 3, 2019, at NTSU Arena (Linkou Arena). The group’s 2022-2023 “Born Pink” tour set a
CPBL players, cheerleaders and officials pose at a news conference in Taipei yesterday announcing the upcoming All-Star Game. This year’s CPBL All-Star Weekend is to be held at the Taipei Dome on July 19 and 20.
The Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled in favor of former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) regarding the legitimacy of her doctoral degree. The issue surrounding Tsai’s academic credentials was raised by former political talk show host Dennis Peng (彭文正) in a Facebook post in June 2019, when Tsai was seeking re-election. Peng has repeatedly accused Tsai of never completing her doctoral dissertation to get a doctoral degree in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1984. He subsequently filed a declaratory action charging that
The Hualien Branch of the High Court today sentenced the main suspect in the 2021 fatal derailment of the Taroko Express to 12 years and six months in jail in the second trial of the suspect for his role in Taiwan’s deadliest train crash. Lee Yi-hsiang (李義祥), the driver of a crane truck that fell onto the tracks and which the the Taiwan Railways Administration's (TRA) train crashed into in an accident that killed 49 people and injured 200, was sentenced to seven years and 10 months in the first trial by the Hualien District Court in 2022. Hoa Van Hao, a