Mainland anger at release of scam suspects
Print Edition
A CHINESE mainland spokesman has urged Taiwan to give fraud suspects “the punishment they deserve,” stressing that their release will only make fraud more rampant and harm cross-Strait law enforcement cooperation.
On Saturday, Taiwan police released 20 fraud suspects who were deported from Malaysia on Friday evening, citing a lack of evidence. They were among 52 people from Taiwan arrested in Malaysia for suspected telecommunication fraud.
“By releasing the suspects, Taiwan authorities disregarded many victims’ interests and harmed them a second time. It also harmed the two sides’ cooperation in jointly cracking down on crimes,” said An Fengshan, a spokesman for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office.
Late last month, Malaysian and Chinese mainland police cooperated on an investigation into five transnational telecommunication fraud cases involving victims on the Chinese mainland, and arrested a total of 119 suspects — 65 from the mainland, 52 from Taiwan and two from Malaysia.
An urged Taiwan to “immediately rectify their mistakes, eliminate the adverse impact, seriously pursue these suspects’ wrongdoings and give them the punishment they deserve,” so as to protect the victims’ interests and prevent greater damage to the development of cross-Strait relations.
Syndicates led by suspects from Taiwan and based in Southeast Asia, Africa and Oceania have been falsely presenting themselves as law enforcement officers to extort money from people on the Chinese mainland through telephone calls, according to police.
In the past few years, police from the mainland and Taiwan have arrested more than 7,700 suspects, about 4,600 of them from Taiwan, in 47 joint operations to fight telecom fraud based in Southeast Asia.
In many cases handled by Taiwan judicial organs, Taiwan suspects were not brought to justice and victims on the mainland were unable to retrieve their lost money, An said.
Boiler rooms run by scammers from Taiwan are said to be responsible for over 50 percent of all telecom fraud on the mainland. Nearly all major cases with reported losses in excess of 10 million yuan (US$1.54 million) were organized by scammers from Taiwan, according to the Ministry of Public Security.
In the past seven days, 77 alleged fraud syndicate members, including 45 from Taiwan, were repatriated to China’s mainland from Africa.
Pre-written scripts
One suspect from Taoyuan in Taiwan, surnamed Jian, told reporters he had traveled to Kenya to join a scam operation in 2014.
He said the organization he worked for split workers into three groups who used pre-written scripts when talking to “clients.”
The first-tier group, about a dozen people, masqueraded as managers of medical insurance accounts to acquire their victims’ personal information, Jian said.
People were told they were victims of identity theft, and their “case” would be transferred to police after they had confirmed certain information.
Then the second-tier group, the “police officers,” took over. This team informed the victims their identities had been used to facilitate money laundering, said Jian, who was one of the “police officers.”
Victims were then pressed for more information, such as family background, occupation, income and bank account details.
The second-tier group would then try to find out how much money the victims had in their bank accounts.
“If there was not much money, we would talk the victims into transferring their balance to us,” said Jian, “however, if they were holding large deposits we would transfer the case to the third-tier group.”
Xu, a member of the third-tier group, told reporters he pretended to be director of a financial crime department.
“We told the victims that their money must be transferred to our ‘safe account’ for investigation, and instructed them how to do this at an ATM,” Xu said.
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