Nearly 99 percent of fraudulent telephone calls can be intercepted after the government worked with telecoms to block incoming calls from numbers beginning with +886 0 to +886 8, the National Communications Commission (NCC) said yesterday.
The service was launched in May to curb a rise in scam calls, and since July 17, subscribers of Chunghwa Telecom’s landline services who receive a call from numbers beginning with +886 9 hear a warning in Mandarin and Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) that the call might be a scam.
The NCC last week said that the same warning might be available for mobile phone service subscribers in the middle of this month.
Photo: Yang Mien-chieh, Taipei Times
The number of phone calls beginning with +886 0 to +886 8 has dropped from 1.98 million in May to 745,000 in July, with the interception rate rising from 91.9 percent in May, 98.5 percent in June and 98.65 percent in July, NCC data showed.
The number of phone calls beginning with +886 9 surged from 8.16 million in April to 14.43 million in May, but declined to 14.35 million in June and 10.3 million in July, the data showed.
The success of intercepting calls beginning with +886 0 to +886 8 has helped reduce the number of phone scams reported to the government’s 165 anti-fraud hotline, from 2,346 in April and 1,600 in May, to 914 in June and 823 in July, the commission said.
In phone scams, which are usually international calls rerouted to Taiwan, the caller often pretends they are from a government agency or financial institution, it said.
Intercepting the numbers at the international telephone switch network decreases people’s exposure to scam calls, it said.
Although the number of phone scams reported to the 165 anti-fraud hotline has fallen, and technology to intercept and warn people about scam calls has proven to be effective, the commission said that there is still room to improve the technology.
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked
Labor rights groups yesterday called on the Ministry of Labor to protect migrant workers in Taiwan’s fishing industry, days after CNN reported alleged far-ranging abuses in the sector, including deaths and forced work. The ministry must enforce domestic labor protection laws on Taiwan-owned deep-sea fishing vessels, the Coalition for Human Rights for Migrant Fishers told a news conference outside the ministry in Taipei after presenting a petition to officials. CNN on Sunday reported that Taiwanese seafood giant FCF Co, the owners of the US-based Bumble Bee Foods, committed human rights abuses against migrant fishers, citing Indonesian migrant fishers. The alleged abuses included denying
RSS