Six men have been arrested on suspicion of defrauding a South Korean man, Taipei police said on Tuesday.
Police launched an investigation after a South Korean businessman in April reported being scammed while seeking to purchase cryptocurrency and a luxury watch through an online platform, the Daan Precinct of the Taipei City Police Department said in a statement.
The South Korean man 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, where the businessman discovered they had nothing to sell.
Photo courtesy of the Taipei Police Department
The South Korean man rushed out of the vehicle after realizing it was a scam without taking his backpack, which contained NT$500,000 in cash for the planned purchases, police said.
The police did not provide further details on exactly what transpired in the vehicle or why the businessman left the backpack behind.
Surveillance footage showed that the suspects briefly stopped in Taipei’s Daan District (大安) to alter the vehicle’s license plate on the day they met the South Korean man, and later abandoned it in New Taipei City’s Sansia District (三峽), police said.
The 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 them and seized more than NT$90,000 in cash, four mobile phones, bank cards and passbooks as evidence in multiple raids in Hualien and New Taipei City’s Pinglin District (坪林) late last month.
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, police said.
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