A police chief was yesterday detained on corruption charges for allegedly colluding with criminals who engaged in human trafficking to Cambodia, the Taipei Police Department said.
Police yesterday handed Ningxia Road Police Station Chief Yeh Yu-hsin (葉育忻) two major demerits, dismissing him from his post in Taipei’s Datong District (大同) Police Precinct.
Corruption, major misconduct and contravention of the law while working as a civil servant can receive punishment of two major demerits under the Police Personnel Management Act (警察人員人事條例), which would lead to dismissal, Civil Service Performance Evaluation Act (公務人員考績法) provisions stipulate.
Photo: CNA
Public prosecutors said they have sufficient evidence of Yeh’s corruption.
Yeh faces charges for receiving bribes, as he allegedly received money in tether cryptocurrency tokens worth NT$1 million (US$32,609), and charges of forgery, illegal access and use of personal information, and for leaking confidential files.
Datong Precinct Chief Wu Tsai-tang (吳在堂), who oversees Yeh’s police station, received two demerits for negligence of duty.
Evidence showed that Yeh had been in contact with alleged gang leader Tu Cheng-che (杜承哲) and others associated with him, investigators said.
Yeh accessed restricted police files to obtain personal information about kidnapped people, passing the information to Tu and the others, who used it to apply for passports and use their bank accounts to transfer money, investigators said.
Tu had reportedly engaged in “Cambodia-style” money extortion, telecom scams and human trafficking, they said.
Police in November last year rescued 58 people who had been kidnapped and held against their will at three locations, and recovered the bodies of three people believed to have been killed due to torture and beating by Tu’s gang.
The gang placed job adverts on social media, promising high wages and offers of “easy loan money” to entice people. When people attended job interviews, they were seized and bound, and forced to pass over their bank details to be used to launder money, while some people were forced to work for telecom scammers in Cambodia, investigators said.
Tu and several others in the gang fled and went into hiding after last year’s raids, but police tracked them down and arrested them last month, including an operator named Fu Yu-lin (傅榆藺) and “business managers” Chen Hua-wei (陳樺韋) and Tu Shih-hong (涂世泓).
Police said the telecom scammers were initially set up by Chinese business investments for hotels, casinos and tourism ventures, and later gained financial backing from Chinese businesspeople and gangsters, as Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has close relations with Beijing.
These ventures later focused more on casinos, and then switched to telecom scams and extortion, colluding with Taiwanese organized crime syndicates with which they already had ties, police said.
These groups include the Bamboo Union, the Four Seas Gang and the Heavenly Way Alliance, police said.
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