The suspected leaders of two human trafficking rings have been indicted for a second time after more of their victims were rescued in Cambodia and returned to Taiwan.
The groups have been accused of luring 88 Taiwanese to the Southeast Asian country with lucrative job offers, only to sell them into forced labor.
The alleged ringleaders, surnamed Lin (林) and Lee (李), were among nine suspects indicted in September last year after 22 victims were returned to Taiwan.
They were charged with human trafficking, attempted fraud, obstructing freedom, contravening the Organized Crime Prevention Act (組織犯罪防制條例) and deceiving people to travel abroad for profit.
Taipei prosecutors on Wednesday filed similar charges against Lin and Lee after another 30 victims returned home.
The prosecutors did not divulge when the victims arrived in Taiwan.
Neither prosecutors nor law enforcement authorities offered any details about the three dozen victims still unaccounted for.
Starting in late 2021, the two groups placed recruitment ads on Facebook offering high-paying customer service jobs in the gaming sector in Cambodia to lure unemployed people there, the prosecutors said.
Once the victims arrived in Cambodia, they were sold to telecom fraud rings for US$17,000 to US$18,000 per person, the prosecutors said, adding that the fraud rings operated mainly out of industrial parks in Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville.
The fraud rings held the victims against their will and forced them to engage in telecoms fraud, they said.
Those who did not comply or performed poorly were beaten, given electric shocks, locked up in a confined space or asked for a high ransom, the prosecutors said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS