The Legislative Yuan today passed amendments to the Telecommunications Management Act (電信管理法) aimed at reducing telecom fraud.
The new amendments require second-level Internet access service providers and mobile virtual network operators to register as official telecommunications businesses.
Within one year of the new regulations going into effect, entities that fail to register would face fines of between NT$100,000 and NT$1 million (US$3,386 and US$33,858) and be given a deadline to comply.
Photo: Fang Wei-chieh, Taipei Times
Failure to meet the deadline would result in repeated fines.
The legislation affects businesses that provide users Internet access, as well as those that lease or purchase phone numbers and networks to then sell their own services to users.
The amendments are necessary because the Telecommunications Act (電信法) was in 2020 replaced by the Telecommunications Management Act, which did not have the same regulations, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Huang Chien-hao (黃健豪) said.
The former act had regulations in place that covered Type II businesses, which are administered by the National Communications Commission, while such regulations were removed from the current act, Huang said.
The goal was to encourage more innovative business models in Type II telecommunications and to develop a wider range of services to stimulate economic activity, but instead, the relaxed regulations allowed fraudsters to exploit loopholes in the system, he said.
Since the repeal of the original law in 2020, the number of fraud cases investigated by prosecutors has risen dramatically, Huang said.
In 2021, there were 98,256 cases of telecom fraud, with the number increasing to 160,803 in 2022, 229,711 in 2023 and 167,932 last year, he said.
The new amendments are a way to reduce fraud using Type II services and telecom fraud more generally, he added.
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