New regulations could see whistleblowers against scalping receive a reward of up to NT$100,000 (US$3,181), the Ministry of Education’s Sports Administration said.
Authorities in local cities and counties should launch investigations within two months of whistle-blowers delivering all necessary documents, according to the Regulations on Rewards for Reporting Violations for Tickets at Sport Competitions and Events (運動賽事或活動票券違規案件檢舉處理及獎勵辦法), recently promulgated by the Sports Administration.
The regulations were announced to support the amended Sports Industry Development Act (運動產業發展條例).
Photo: Chen Chih-chu, Taipei Times
Amendments to the Sports Industry Development Act in December last year saw the addition of Article 24-1, which would punish ticket scalpers by mandating that they pay 10 to 50 times the price per ticket sold.
The administration said that ordering tickets or obtaining proof of ticket purchases via computers or other equipment could be punished with a prison sentence of up to three years, alongside a NT$3 million fine.
The reward would give whistleblowers 20 percent of any fines, up to NT$100,000.
Whistle-blowers would also be eligible to receive NT$100,000 if they report incidents of people obtaining tickets using false information.
The reward regulations also state that the jurisdiction of scalping incidents would go to local authorities holding the competition or event, and if events are held in multiple locations, the authorities of the first event location would oversee the case.
Reports may be in written or verbal form, and should be logged and recorded according to the regulations.
The regulations say that the whistle-blower should include their name, address, the Web site or organization’s name, the address of the offending organization, the location and time of the competition, or the event’s name.
The regulations say that whistle-blowers would not receive a cash reward if the incident they reported had been covered by the media or was already under investigation by law enforcement agencies.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
COGNITIVE WARFARE: Allegations that the documents were proof that the former US envoy tried to smuggle alcohol were designed to manipulate public opinion Leaked documents related to customs clearance procedures for vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) that have been circulating on the Internet appear to be an attempt to manipulate public opinion against the government, a source said on Sunday. A post on online platform Baoliao Commune (爆料公社) on Sunday showed documents it said were evidence that Hsiao had smuggled alcohol through customs with the assistance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and said that the documents were part of a 4GB data dump of confidential material acquired by hackers. In a rebuttal, the source said that they were not confidential documents, but rather