The National Immigration Agency (NIA) yesterday said it arrested 38 suspects accused of buying or making and selling fake residency permits and other forms of identification.
The suspects, including 34 buyers of fake documents, were arrested over the past few months and have been referred to the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office for investigation into suspected forgery, fraud and organized crime, the agency said in a statement.
The NIA said it learned of the forgery ring through social media advertisements offering to “make, sell and mail” Republic of China (Taiwan) identification cards, resident permits and national health insurance cards.
Photo provided by the National Immigration Agency
An investigation found that the ads were being posted by a forgery operation run by an undocumented Vietnamese migrant worker identified as Mei (梅), the agency said in a statement.
Mei, who is in her 30s, was allegedly running the operation from an apartment in Taipei, along with three other suspects — another undocumented Vietnamese and a transnational married couple, the agency said.
The four suspects, one of whom is a Taiwanese man, were allegedly forging the documents using high-end computers, photocopiers and laminators, the agency added.
Mei was allegedly charging NT$3,000 to NT$8,000 (US$100 to US$266.76) for each document, and over a two-year period, the ring had allegedly earned about NT$10 million from a large number of undocumented migrant workers, it said.
The NIA had surveilled the four suspects for about eight months, before arresting them in a raid on the apartment on July 28, it said.
During that period, the agency arrested 34 undocumented migrant workers, who had obtained forged documents from the suspects, it said.
The NIA said that the maximum fine for knowingly employing an undocumented migrant worker is NT$750,000.
About 70,331 undocumented migrant workers live in Taiwan, 39,927 of whom are from Vietnam, Ministry of Labor data showed.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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