The Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted six people in a cybersex criminal case involving an estimated 86 victims that has been compared to the “Nth Room” case in South Korea.
The suspects allegedly contravened the Child and Youth Sexual Exploitation Act (兒童及少年性剝削防制條例) and the Organized Crime Prevention Act (犯罪組織犯罪條例), the office said.
In the “Nth Room” case, a person spread sexually exploitative content on the Telegram messaging app from 2018 to 2020.
Photo: Chen Chien-chih, Taipei Times
Pan Tse-wei (潘擇維), 35, and Chen Tsuo-wei (陳佐維), 37, are accused of targeting female minors on Instagram to obtain nudes or other photographs of an indecent nature by saying they could make money or were hiring models, the office said.
The minors were asked to take photographs of themselves displaying their IDs and wearing their school uniforms, which Pan and Chen used to threaten them to take indecent photos, the office said.
Chen, Pan and accomplices Chang Hui-yu (張蕙祐) and Liu You-sheng (劉郁晟), both 29, along with two other accomplices, surnamed Lee (李) and Su (蘇), uploaded the photos to a group on Telegram, where they charged people to view them, it said.
They initially sought credits for online game as payment before switching to the Tether cryptocurrency, it added.
The group made NT$8 million (US$253,735) in just under three months from the scheme, the office said.
Their actions demonstrated cruelty that violated human dignity and posed a severe threat to social order, it said.
The indictment requested that Chen, Pan and Liu be sentenced to 30 years in prison, Lee to 10 years, Chang to seven years and Su to five years, and that the court approve the confiscation of all illegal profits generated by the group’s actions.
Additional reporting by CNA
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS