Taipei police have arrested six people suspected of defrauding a South Korean national through a scheme involving cryptocurrency and a luxury watch, the Daan Precinct of the Taipei Police Department said in a statement yesterday.
Police launched an investigation after a South Korean businessman in Taiwan in April reported being scammed while seeking to purchase cryptocurrency and a luxury watch through an online platform.
Photo courtesy of the Taipei Police Department
The South Korean met three men — a 33-year-old surnamed Lu (盧), a 26-year-old surnamed Hou (侯) and a 20-year-old surnamed Yang (楊) — at a coffee shop in Taipei before moving to their car to complete the transaction, only to discover they had nothing to sell.
According to police, the South Korean rushed out of the car after realizing it was a scam without taking his backpack, which contained NT$500,000 in cash for the planned purchases.
The police did not provide any further details on exactly what happened when the man was in the car or why he left the backpack behind.
After reviewing CCTV footage, the police found that the suspects briefly stopped in Taipei's Daan District (大安) to alter the license plate on the day they met the man, before abandoning the vehicle in New Taipei City's Sansia District (三峽) in an attempt to evade pursuit.
Those three suspects were arrested in April.
Further investigation identified three more men — a 37-year-old surnamed Yu (俞), a 31-year-old surnamed Chang (張) and a 30-year-old surnamed Wen (溫) from Hualien County — who were allegedly involved in orchestrating the scheme, providing fake IDs and supplying vehicles.
The police said they arrested the three people and seized more than NT$90,000 in cash, four mobile phones, bank cards and passbooks as evidence during multiple raids in Hualien and New Taipei City's Pinglin District (坪林) late last month, but the case was not made public until yesterday.
All six suspects have been referred to the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office on charges including fraud, contravention of the Organized Crime Prevention Act (組織犯罪防制條例) and money laundering, the police said.
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