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Monday, 27 June 2011
Phone scam bust is fruit of crime pact
A two-year-old cross-strait agreement allowed police from Taipei and Beijing to work together to break up ring defrauding mainlanders out of millions of yuan
A two-year-old cross-strait agreement allowed police from Taipei and Beijing to work together to break up ring defrauding mainlanders out of millions of yuan
Lawrence Chung in Taipei 19 June 2011
A cross-strait agreement to fight crime has seen Taipei and Beijing team up to crack down on phone scams that have duped thousands of mainlanders out of a combined 70 million yuan (HK$84.3 million).
Under an agreement signed by Beijing and Taipei in 2009, police from Taiwan, the mainland, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand arrested 598 people in their jurisdictions on June 9 for using phone scams to swindle mainlanders. The crackdown was considered a landmark move and the start of a new trend in the region.
“It was unprecedented considering how many countries were involved and how many police officers were mobilised,” Liao Yu-lu, chief of the department of criminal investigation at Taiwan’s Central Police University, said.
Once rampant in Taiwan and on the mainland, the gangs moved their headquarters to Southeast Asian countries, where they remained focused on scamming mainlanders.
“It was actually quite easy to cheat the mainland people,” the United Daily News in Taipei quoted a suspect as saying.
“People in Taiwan have been educated well enough to tell the callers to stop cheating them or simply hang up the phone, but on the mainland as long as you pretend and sound like police, they buy that easily.”
In a typical case, swindlers called victims and claimed to be police, procurators or bank staff, and then persuaded the victims to transfer money to the criminals’ accounts, the mainland’s Ministry of Public Security said.
In some cases, while pretending to be police officers they told victims that their accounts were being used by criminal gangs for money laundering and urged them to transfer their funds to a “safe account”, it said. Swindlers often had the names and home addresses of victims so as to sound more authentic.
Technological advances allow fraudsters to operate across borders, as shown in a growing number of scams involving instant messaging, social networking and online bidding sites.
Since Taipei and Beijing signed the deal amid improving ties, more than 1,600 suspected swindlers had been rounded up on both sides in less than a year, Taiwanese police said.
Police in Taichung, in central Taiwan, said in August they found that a ringleader had set up internet and telecoms platforms in Southeast Asia.
“We later exchanged information with our mainland counterparts in line with the 2009 agreement,” Lin Hung-yu, a division head of the criminal investigation department in central Taiwan, said.
Taiwan and the mainland sent staff to each other’s offices to discuss co-operation, he said. As many suspects were found to have operated their phone scam rings in Southeast Asia, Lin said they proposed a joint regional crackdown.
Of the 598 people arrested, 410 from were Taiwan and 186 from the mainland. One suspect was from Cambodia and one was from Vietnam.
Flights were chartered to extradite 186 suspects from Cambodia - 122 to Taiwan and 64 to the mainland.
Under Taiwanese law, fraud ringleaders face jail sentences of less than two years, while their accomplices are given no more than six months, which can be converted into a fine. But on the mainland, fraud ringleaders face up to life imprisonment for big phone scams.
Professor Tsai Tyan-muh, a criminologist at Taiwan’s Central Police University, said fraud rings were common because they were cheap to run but offered huge profits, and “because of the light sentences, they come back quickly after each crackdown”.
Taiwan’s police chief, Wang Cho-chun, said the latest operation not only dealt a heavy blow to the fraud rings but also improved regional co-operation. “We believe the operation has set a new trend in joint-crime fighting,” he said.
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Phone scam bust is fruit of crime pact
A two-year-old cross-strait agreement allowed police from Taipei and Beijing to work together to break up ring defrauding mainlanders out of millions of yuan
Lawrence Chung in Taipei
19 June 2011
A cross-strait agreement to fight crime has seen Taipei and Beijing team up to crack down on phone scams that have duped thousands of mainlanders out of a combined 70 million yuan (HK$84.3 million).
Under an agreement signed by Beijing and Taipei in 2009, police from Taiwan, the mainland, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand arrested 598 people in their jurisdictions on June 9 for using phone scams to swindle mainlanders. The crackdown was considered a landmark move and the start of a new trend in the region.
“It was unprecedented considering how many countries were involved and how many police officers were mobilised,” Liao Yu-lu, chief of the department of criminal investigation at Taiwan’s Central Police University, said.
Once rampant in Taiwan and on the mainland, the gangs moved their headquarters to Southeast Asian countries, where they remained focused on scamming mainlanders.
“It was actually quite easy to cheat the mainland people,” the United Daily News in Taipei quoted a suspect as saying.
“People in Taiwan have been educated well enough to tell the callers to stop cheating them or simply hang up the phone, but on the mainland as long as you pretend and sound like police, they buy that easily.”
In a typical case, swindlers called victims and claimed to be police, procurators or bank staff, and then persuaded the victims to transfer money to the criminals’ accounts, the mainland’s Ministry of Public Security said.
In some cases, while pretending to be police officers they told victims that their accounts were being used by criminal gangs for money laundering and urged them to transfer their funds to a “safe account”, it said. Swindlers often had the names and home addresses of victims so as to sound more authentic.
Technological advances allow fraudsters to operate across borders, as shown in a growing number of scams involving instant messaging, social networking and online bidding sites.
Since Taipei and Beijing signed the deal amid improving ties, more than 1,600 suspected swindlers had been rounded up on both sides in less than a year, Taiwanese police said.
Police in Taichung, in central Taiwan, said in August they found that a ringleader had set up internet and telecoms platforms in Southeast Asia.
“We later exchanged information with our mainland counterparts in line with the 2009 agreement,” Lin Hung-yu, a division head of the criminal investigation department in central Taiwan, said.
Taiwan and the mainland sent staff to each other’s offices to discuss co-operation, he said. As many suspects were found to have operated their phone scam rings in Southeast Asia, Lin said they proposed a joint regional crackdown.
Of the 598 people arrested, 410 from were Taiwan and 186 from the mainland. One suspect was from Cambodia and one was from Vietnam.
Flights were chartered to extradite 186 suspects from Cambodia - 122 to Taiwan and 64 to the mainland.
Under Taiwanese law, fraud ringleaders face jail sentences of less than two years, while their accomplices are given no more than six months, which can be converted into a fine. But on the mainland, fraud ringleaders face up to life imprisonment for big phone scams.
Professor Tsai Tyan-muh, a criminologist at Taiwan’s Central Police University, said fraud rings were common because they were cheap to run but offered huge profits, and “because of the light sentences, they come back quickly after each crackdown”.
Taiwan’s police chief, Wang Cho-chun, said the latest operation not only dealt a heavy blow to the fraud rings but also improved regional co-operation. “We believe the operation has set a new trend in joint-crime fighting,” he said.
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