The Taipei District Prosecutor’s Office is investigating a fraud case in which suspects gained access to the personal information, accounts and insurance of a New Taipei City woman and emptied her savings, taking NT$83 million (US$2.6 million) over three months.
The victim said that she received a call from a person identifying themselves as a member of Chunghwa Telecom’s Risk Control Department in April, who said someone tried to use her identity to register a phone number and urged her to call the anti-fraud hotline.
She was put in contact with a person who identified themselves as an agent at the hotline, who told her that she was being indicted, suspected of aiding and abetting scammers who had deposited tens of millions of dollars into her account, and that she must join a chat group in the messaging app Line to cooperate with the investigation.
Photo: Taipei Times
That chat group was actually operated by scammers, she said.
In the chat, the victim was told by another member, pretending to be a prosecutor, not to speak to anyone due to the ongoing investigation, according to the police.
The fake prosecutor told the victim that she would be detained if she did not cooperate and instructed her to transfer her assets to an account opened by the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC), change her passwords, sell her stock, refund her insurance, and deposit the funds into the account, police said.
The scammers also told the victim to set the fake FSC account as a designated transfer account to increase her daily transaction limit to NT$3 million, police said, adding that the victim had made more than 70 transactions over three months.
The victim became suspicious in July after seeing that no one was reading her messages in the chat group and contacted police.
Former New Taipei District Prosecutor’s Office Anti-Corruption Division prosecutor Ho Ko-fan (何克凡) said that real prosecutors would not ask people to set up designated transfer accounts or provide Internet banking passwords, nor would they act through Line.
If members of the public encounter a similar situation, they must handle it cautiously, he added.
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