Seven suspects have been indicted for allegedly organizing a fraud scheme with 179 victims that earned illegal income of NT$114.77 million (US$3.58 million), the Taoyuan District Prosecutors' Office said today.
A lawyer, surnamed Yu (游), was found to have recruited a couple, surnamed Kuo (郭) and Huang (黃), working at the Bank of Taiwan, and four others to form a scam gang using shell companies and cryptocurrency for money laundering, prosecutors said.
Photo: Wang Jie, Taipei Times
The prosecutors recommended that Yu receive a 13-year prison term, Kuo nine years, six years for Huang and two to seven years for the others for contravening the Organized Crime Prevention Act (組織犯罪防制條例), Money Laundering Control Act (洗錢防制法) and offenses of aggravated fraud.
After being recruited, Kuo and Huang looked for potential victims among bank customers trying to obtain loans, prosecutors said.
They then persuaded these people to borrow money from the bank and join their fake investment plan, they added.
After receiving the money, the gang allegedly transferred it to dummy accounts to create fake cash flows and changed the money into foreign currency to buy cryptocurrency overseas, illicitly earning more than NT$100 million from May last year to June, they said.
They were brought in and questioned in June.
After the Taoyuan District Court notified Yu that the High Court had rejected his appeal against his detention order, he allegedly bought a one-way ticket to Seoul.
He was arrested at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport and ordered to be detained in August.
Prosecutors confiscated NT$8.27 million and US$30,000 in cash, and cryptocurrency worth US$270,000.
The couple’s houses in Taipei and Kaohsiung were also searched.
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