Starting from the middle of next month, people receiving international calls on landlines, regardless of the country the calls are from, would first hear a seven-
second warning that the call might be a scam, the National Communications Commission (NCC) said yesterday.
Some mobile phone users would also hear the same warning whenever they receive phone calls from numbers that begin with (+886 9), the commission said, as the government steps up measures to curb phone scams.
Photo: Ting Yi, Taipei Times
In May, Chunghwa Telecom, which operates 93 to 94 percent of the landline market, was first asked to intercept calls with phone numbers beginning with (+886 0) to (+886 9).
After Taiwan Statebuilding Party member Wu Hsin-tai (吳欣岱) complained that she had received a scam call that did not begin with any of the identified numbers, the telecom then blocked numbers that do not begin with valid country codes.
Last month, the telecom’s landline service subscribers began hearing a seven-second warning about scam calls whenever they received a call that begins with (+886 9).
“Starting from the middle of next month, people who receive international calls on landlines would all hear the warning, regardless of what the country codes are,” NCC Vice Chairman and spokesman Wong Po-tsung (翁柏宗) told reporters at the commission’s weekly news conference.
Chunghwa Telecom originally planned to offer the same service to its mobile phone service subscribers at the end of October, but it is now aiming to make the service available in the middle of next month, following a stress test next week.
Taiwan Mobile and Far EasTone Telecommunications are scheduled to offer the same service to their mobile phone users at the end of next month or the beginning of October, he said.
In June, an average of 330,000 phone calls beginning with (+886 9) were recorded per day, the commission said, citing data provided by Chunghwa Telecom.
When the service was launched on July 17, the number dropped to 185,000 on that day, it said.
Of the connected calls, 8,700 were hung up before receivers finished listening to the alert. There were about 19,000 calls where receivers continued the communication after listening to the alert.
On July 18, the number of (+886 9) phone calls decreased to 120,000. Of the connected calls, 3,400 were disconnected soon after the alerts were heard. There were only about 8,500 calls where receivers continued the communication after listening to the alert, the commission said.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening 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) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS