The Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld a guilty verdict for two people over the imprisonment and subsequent deaths of three people targeted in a fraud scheme.
The two had their life sentences upheld.
Eleven named accomplices received jail sentences ranging from five years to 25 years and six months.
Photo: Yang Kuo-wen, Taipei Times
The verdict is not final.
Fu Yu-lin (傅榆藺) and Chen Hua-wei (陳樺韋) were accused of being the masterminds behind a scam group that lured people with fake job offers before abducting and torturing them to gain control of their bank accounts.
The accounts were used in schemes that defrauded 267 people of almost NT$400 million (US$12.18 million), court records from an earlier trial said.
A man surnamed Huang (黃), aged 38, a woman also surnamed Huang, aged 45, and a man surnamed Lin (林), aged 57, died from abuse in captivity, the verdict said.
Their bodies were abandoned in mountainous areas in Taoyuan and Nantou County, Chinese-language media reported.
In 2022, a police investigation into a missing persons report exposed the group’s activities and resulted in its members being detained.
The Shilin District Court last year convicted 29 people in connection with the case, sentencing three people accused of masterminding the plot to life in prison.
The defendants appealed the verdict at the Taiwan High Court, which — citing a need to maintain judicial efficiency — separated them into two groups for retrial due to the large amount of evidence and number of people involved.
Yesterday’s proceedings involving 13 defendants largely upheld the lower court’s verdict, with the judges saying the greed of the accused had caused three deaths and inflicted grievous harm to others.
Tu Cheng-che (杜承哲), a third leader of the crime group, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in a separate trial of 16 other defendants earlier last month.
Three other accomplices in Tu’s trial were also sentenced to life in prison.
In separate news, the Ciaotao District Prosecutors’ Office said that it has indicted two university professors identified by their surnames, Wang (王) and Tang (唐), for corruption in an alleged cash for grades scheme.
The professors who taught at an unnamed Kaohsiung-based national university of science and technology are believed to have accepted bribes ranging from NT$100,000 to NT$400,000 from six students in exchange for better grades and help with their theses, the office said in a news release.
The Ciaotao District Court rejected a request by the prosecutors’ office to remand the professors and a student surnamed Cheng (鄭), saying that they posed little flight risk due to their limited financial means and because the professors had confessed.
Wang, Tang and Cheng were released on bail of NT$200,000, NT$100,000 and NT$50,000 respectively, while five other students were released on bail of NT$100,000 each.
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