Public awareness about fraud should be raised, as many people are still falling victim to it, although the 165 anti-fraud hotline has prevented people from losing NT$800 million (US$26.67 million) over the past five years, the National Audit Office said on Sunday.
To combat fraud, the National Police Agency’s (NPA) Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) set up the hotline in April 2004. It launched a program to detect and prevent fraud in February 2018 and a program to track fraud related to online shipping in July 2020.
The office said that its annual audit report for last year found that the amount of money lost to fraud has been high in the past few years, but there were few reports of suspicious accounts.
Photo: CNA
From 2017 to August last year, the hotline added 120,376 financial accounts to a watch list, blocked more than 16.44 million fraudulent calls and reported 4,606 fraudulent Line IDs, the office said.
It also handled more than 1.72 million reports of fraud, earmarked more than 80,000 financial accounts, reported 4,319 suspicious accounts and prevented 735 people from transferring money, it said.
Statistics from the CIB’s anti-fraud center showed that 108,905 cases of fraud were committed over the same period and more than NT$19.9 billion was lost.
The number of fraud cases increased from 22,689 in 2017 to 23,054 in 2020, while the amount of money lost rose from about NT$4 billion to about NT$4.2 billion.
During the period, 59,319 cases of telecommunications and Internet fraud were committed, in which more than NT$11.9 billion was lost. The number of cases and the amount of money lost were both higher than for traditional fraud.
The office said that as fraudulent cases are getting more serious, it has asked the NPA to supervise the CIB in raising awareness.
The NPA said it has asked police units to target different age groups and populations and develop materials to encourage the public to be alert for fraud.
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