Taiwan protests extralegal deportations from Kenya

These striking birds, juvenile Malaysian Night Herons, I think, tolerate humans getting quite close to them.

More accused Taiwanese scammers are facing deportation. AllAfrica.com has the latest on Taiwan's protests of Kenya's deportations of Taiwanese scammers to China...

'We recall that in April, despite a Kenyan court order requesting the police to return the Taiwanese nationals back, and regardless of numerous attempts and pleas to stop the illegal deportation, two groups of Taiwanese were forcibly deported from Kenya to China on April 8," the ambassador said at a press briefing in Nairobi.

The event sparked a diplomatic row and criticism from human rights organisations.

"We regard this as an extra-legal deportation to China," Mr Chen said.

He said two critical legal issues were lost in the event: that a court order that requires the police to return the Taiwanse was ignored and that "under international human rights law, governments have an obligation not to deport individuals without first giving them an opportunity to contest their removal before a competent authority."

'We urge the Kenyan authorities, when dealing with the Taiwan nationals, to follow international practice and principles and not repeat the error of the past," the ambassador said.

"Governments have an obligation not to deport individuals without first giving them an opportunity to contest their removal before a competent authority"...

Remember the Coffin Murder case? (Taipei Times, Hong Kong Standard):

Criminal Investigation Bureau deputy head Huang Chia-lu (黃嘉祿) said the three men, including the main suspect, a 26-year-old surnamed Tsang (曾), are scheduled to be deported today.

.......

Huang said police picked up the three suspects in Banqiao on Monday and detained them after revoking their entry permits.

Picked up Monday, deported on Tuesday. Because due process. Oh yeah, Taiwan and Hong Kong have no extradition treaty. Just like China and Kenya don't.

Remember the Korean workers who came to Taiwan to protest and were deported? Because due process.

Remember the Chinese bar girls picked up in Miaoli and deported?

Three Chinese women were arrested and deported from Taiwan after they were found to be working as bargirls at a popular scenic spot in Miaoli County on tourist visas, Taiwanese immigration officials said Wednesday.

That was because due process.

Remember the Sri Lankan national who was caught Saturday night and deported on Sunday? Because due process. That case revealed how Taiwan has become a transit point now for people sneaking into other countries.

Did you know Taiwan once deported a batch of 5,000 Filipino workers? I bet all 5,000 got court hearings, right?

24 Chinese deported before they even entered.

Remember that woman who had a baby on a plane to the US and was deported home without her baby. Yeah, MOFA didn't whip up a storm about that.

What do all these people have in common? They were all doing things their visas said they shouldn't be doing.

Just like those (alleged) scammers in Kenya. Once the government determines you have violated your visa, due process is the process by which the police escort you onto the first plane back to wherever you came from. The (alleged) scammers in Kenya were stupid. They entered Kenya from China, and so can be deported back there. That is in fact the default option in the immigration law.

PS: 8 of those deported in that batch of 45 were tried for having fake documents. That's what is called "due process". They were convicted, did a year, and were deported. Just like the two Hong Kong women in the apartment trashing case, who did a few months and were then deported. The other 37 were tried for telecom and business crimes, acquitted, and deported back to China because they entered the country illegally from China. Stupid of them...
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Scammers strike again

Once they get their hooks into you, it never ends.....

I came home the other day and my wife filled me in on the latest in the neverending saga of bloodsucking. The other day the scammers showed up at my father in law's door and told him the spaces for urns containing ashes he "owned" in a Columbarium had been sold.

The three louts who visited my Dad in law told him that although the spaces had been sold, in order to realize the money from the deal, he had to purchase his share of the land under them first. After that, he'd realize his millions. They immediately relieved him of $10,000 NT for the "processing fee" for the "sale". Since he doesn't have on hand the $500K they told him he'd need to purchase the land (the younger generation has thankfully taken over management of his accounts), he started ringing up relatives.

My sister in law ran over to his house and got the company name from him. She whipped out the newspaper and showed him: 2o odd people from that and related firms had been arrested in land scams that week. Probably the gang needed the additional money for bail so members could flee to China and judged my Pa to be an easy mark. My father in law held firm: the sale was real, and he just needed another $500,000 to complete it. His sister, probably the toughest, sharpest businessman I know, rushed over to explain that it was a scam. All three of his daughters called him. But still he won't believe anyone in his family. We even had a local dai shu, a kind of paralegal who specializes in land sales, explain to him that the title certificates they showed him were obvious fakes. No dice.

The scammers showed up the next day but my father in law's eldest sister was present and waiting for them. She herded them back out the door; she's in her 80s and smokes cigars and does shots and is afraid of nothing and no one. She read my father in law the riot act and then spent the day on the phone with my wife, strategizing.....

He's blown enough money on these scams to put all five of his grandchildren through college and have enough left over to buy them all small apartments when they graduate.

It's just so incredibly painful...
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Daily Links:

• Frozen Garlic advocates for Solar Power in the wake of Fukushima
• Boy I would sure like to link to some other stories but everything is about radiation not hitting Taiwan.
  

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

Does the public like ECFA?

Funny new scam: on ATMs in Taiwan in less public areas, you can find a sign that says THE WITHDRAWAL FUNCTION ON THIS ATM IS BROKEN. PLEASE USE THE TRANSFER FUNCTION AND THEN INPUT THIS NUMBER followed by a string of numbers. Why didn't I think of that?

Speaking of scams, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) created an infomercial claiming that if Taiwan doesn't sign ECFA, then it will be marginalized like.... North Korea. No, I'm not making that up. We are headed for Pyongyangville if we don't move closer to China. Wish someone would inform the MAC that North Korea's biggest trading partner is.... China.

Meanwhile, in the trenches, Joe Whisbee remains highly skeptical of the wonders of ECFA. Global Views asked the public for its opinion last week and found that even when it loaded the question, it couldn't get more than 51% to agree to "if there are overall benefits for Taiwan then the government should sign it". Curious that even if it has benefits, half the public won't support it. The straight up support/not support question got 46.2% supporting, 35.9% not supporting. I suspect from other polls that the uncommitteds hide a lot of Greenies who are against it.

The pro-KMT China Times polled the public on ECFA. Results?

1. Do you know that our government is planning to conclude an ECFA (Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement), or Cross-Strait Economic Agreement, for short, with the Mainland?

Yes 73.6%
No 26.4%

Where did they find those 26.4% who have never heard of ECFA? Question three is similar to the Global Views survey:

3. Overall, do you support the signing of a cross-Strait economic agreement?

Yes 42.6%
No 33.8%
No opinion / Don’t know 23.6%

Can't find majority support for ECFA in Taiwan. 67% also supported a public debate on ECFA between the parties, and the next question, which asks who should represent the DPP in a putative debate, says:

Tsai Ing-wen 48.1%
Yu Si-kun 4.2%
Su Tseng-chang 25.5%

Former DPP Chairman Yu Si-kun is about as popular as root canals, while the public obviously appears to have a high opinion of Dr. Tsai, the current Chair.

ADDED: As a smart friend of mine pointed out, the pan-Blue polls never ask if there should be a referendum on ECFA. That position has widespread support on the island.
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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Thoughts on fooling oneself

Online death threats against President Ma's daughters and Ma himself made the news this week, although it looks like the former is a protest move. Such threats serve no one.

Threats or not, Ma's popularity remains in a ditch, and is likely to stay there for the foreseeable future. Both the prediction market at NCCU and current polls appear to say Ma would lose if the election were held today, though much depends on who the DPP runs. The Liberty Times trumpeted today (via Taipei Times translation):

The embarrassing truth about how President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has concerned himself with electioneering rather than running the nation is becoming clearer by the day. Despite this, his approval rating keeps falling. Not only Taiwanese, but also foreign academics are starting to doubt his chances of re-election.

Shelley Rigger, associate professor of political science at Davidson College in North Carolina, recently said Ma’s prospects for re-election look bleak because of his abysmal approval rating and public dissatisfaction with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).

But the Liberty Times is wrong on what Rigger thinks; Rigger said in a Q&A session at a hearing this week that she thinks Ma's chances of losing in 2012 are remote. But then she believes him competent, too. It's striking to read the Liberty Times editorial and see how remarkably fact-free it is; not a single policy, poll, or survey is cited, and it comprehensively misunderstands Rigger's position on Ma. There's a better piece in today's LT that more correctly describes and addresses Rigger.

I was reading an interesting piece the other day (sorry, can't recall where) that asserted that studies show that when an erroneous position is not refuted, belief in it is low, but when it is publicly refuted, belief in it rises dramatically, a sort of academic confirmation of Darwin's observation that false theories quickly die, but false facts are impossible to kill. Counterintuitive results like that one may help explain the ongoing problem in my own family that is replicated across many Taiwan families: gangsters preying on seniors. No matter how many times we explain to my father in law, no matter how powerful our evidence, no matter who presents it to him, he continues to believe that the storage sites for ashes in local columbariums actually exist and that he will make a killing on their sale once they are sold. It's basically swampland in Florida....

My sister in law walked into their house the other day to find him once again handing over NT$90,000 to scammers right in his living room. She was shocked; most everyone in our family could use the money, but he gives it to complete strangers for nonexistent investments. She found out that the scammers had loaded the families onto buses and then driven them around northern Taipei county, pointing to columbariums and saying "yours are here, and your sites are there," etc. Could it be more completely transparent?

It's not like everyone hasn't talked to him about it. Not only my savvy investor brother in law, who is a sought after manager in local tech firms, my wife, myself, my sister in laws, both highly educated, but also a relative who runs a funeral home and knows all the sites personally have all carefully explained to him that it is all a scam. Moreover, he lost all his life savings in a previous scam but still hasn't learned to be cautious. All over Taiwan, families face this problem. It's one that is in serious need of government action, one that could benefit whatever party tackled it.

Twain once said that you can't reason a man out of what he wasn't reasoned into. But surely, there must be a way. Because after their savings comes the house they own...
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Daily Links:

• A Harvard magazine roundtable on China. Also, a review of Deborah Brautigan's new book on China in Africa that challenges assumptions.
• Richard Bush's testimony on China-Taiwan relations.
• Dogfighting over the Taiwan Strait (Wired.com)
• Japan's Hatayama meets with China's Taiwan people. Can anything good happen?
• Thank god the nuisance from Taiwan's democracy is going to stop intefering with the serious purpose of making money. Luckily some of the commenters are more rational.
  
• AFP reports on US officials saying that there has been no retaliation from China over the arms sales.
• Amnesty International's open letter on the death penalty in Taiwan.
  

AWESOME: Virtual Drive down Highway 11 (h/t to Kerim)

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Scam of the Century

My friend alerted me to this clever, well-satisfied scammer. How come I never think of scams like this?

Allegedly, Hsu posted photos online of a young model and used that image to contact the women. Going under the name Angor, he introduced himself as a 30-year-old son of a Taiwanese father and French mother who was on business in the US, but was looking to marry a Taiwanese
woman.

However, according to reports, Angor would not consider marrying a woman unless she was prepared to have sex with his father - Hsu, in real life. The request was explained by the fact that Angor's father had terminal prostate cancer and only six months to live. Only constant sex would keep him alive, Angor told the women.

Some 100 women, aged between 28 and 50, were drawn in by the scheme. Of those, about 20 went on to have sex with Hsu. Others sent money to help with Angor's mother's breast cancer surgery.

One married woman, identified as Mrs Yu, gave Hsu 180 million Taiwanese dollars (5.4 million US dollars) to buy stocks, a house, a car and a diamond watch, and gave him 100,000 Taiwanese dollars (3,000 US dollars) monthly living expense, in the hope that Angor would marry her.

$5.4 million US!!!!

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Taiwan's Madoff: with bonus unsolved murder!

Wall Street Journal went to town on the amazing Danny Pang with a wonderful investigative piece......

Mr. Pang's résumé depicts a glittering success story: a Taiwanese immigrant who earned an M.B.A., worked on Wall Street and now heads a $4 billion investment fund. He also became a partner in another fund firm with business luminaries such as Frank Carlucci, the former defense secretary and ex-Carlyle Group chairman, and former Lockheed Martin Chief Executive Norman Augustine.

But both Mr. Pang's past and his business may not be quite as they appear. The university from which he says he has an M.B.A. and another degree says it has no record of either. Morgan Stanley, where Mr. Pang's bio says he was a senior vice president and senior high-tech merger adviser, says it can find no record it ever employed him.

A former president of the firm Mr. Pang heads -- Private Equity Management Group Inc. in Irvine, Calif. -- says Mr. Pang told him in 2007 that part of the enterprise involved a Ponzi scheme. The executive also alleges that Mr. Pang improperly used some of investors' cash for the firm's benefit and once told him to deceive investors with a fake insurance policy.

The article is muuuuch too long to excerpt here. Go read it. My man Johnny Neihu had a rollicking good time with the tale as well today... thanks to all the readers who forwarded it to me.

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Scamming my father in law

A few weeks ago I wrote on my in-laws, victims of scammers again and again....

Like many Taiwanese their age, they were ripped off in the numerous Ponzi and pyramid schemes that proliferated in Taiwan during the bubble era of the late 1980s. In their case it was a 'friend' who ripped off their life savings for investment in the famous H scam (I'm not naming it publicly), served a brief prison sentence, and is now enjoying my in-laws' hard-earned cash. They used to go stand in front of his house periodically for years afterwards, silently begging him to return the cash...

...the H officials -- it was an established company -- recently met with the victims. They are unable to compensate them, but they did offer them spaces in the linguta, repositories where the ashes of the dead are kept (columbaria, I think they are called).

Immediately the scammers moved in. After all, the list of H victims is basically a list of people with proven ability to be scammed. For just NT$50K, they promised that they would sell the linguta spaces. My father in law immediately went for it, and another $50K vanished from his accounts. Finally my wife intervened and told him she would sell them on the internet. And sure enough, if you get on Yahoo and search for linguta spaces, you'll find the children of these victims selling the spaces so that 'their parents will have the peace of providing for their children' when they die. For the elderly burned in this and numerous other scams, the humiliation is double: not merely being victimized, but leaving nothing to the next generation as they are supposed to.

The scammers returned yesterday. This morning my father in law calls my wife and explains that a new company had contacted him, asking if he linguta spaces. When he replied that he did but another company was selling them, they responded by tut-tutting: if he had only had them in hand, they would have bought them instantly. Veterans of scams will recognize the high pressure sales tactic to dislocate the mark. They then went on to diss my father's current representative selling the linguta, saying that they were corrupt and untrustworthy. My father bought that line completely. My wife had to argue with him on the phone -- how did they know who you were and how many spaces you had? Of course, she pointed out, it is all the same people posing as three different firms, calling every couple of months, sucking another wan or two out of him.... the worst part is not that the elderly are so often easy marks, but that once scammed, it is so difficult to get them to give up on the scam and to instill skepticism in them.

The crowning irony is that my brother in law, who sinks all his money into property and is a pretty smart buyer, viewed the linguta certificates and pronounced them probable fakes. The whole thing appears to be one big scam from start to finish. It's heartbreaking that these things happen, and the authorities do so little about them.

[Taiwan]

Cold Times at 85C

Dragonflies cavort at a local temple as angry skies announce the advent of typhoon Sinlaku.

I have to admit that scams mesmerize me, and UDN (here, here) reported on an appalling one today....

Everyone knows 85C, the local coffee chain that rocketed out in the last few years, establishing stores in small towns that Barista and Starbucks had turned up their collective noses at, and even colonizing far-off Sydney with a store.

Down in Tainan two of the branch stores hit upon an ugly scam that can't possibly be unique to those two businesses. Virtually every major business on the island has a collection box for the receipts right there next to the cash registers. These are supposedly given to charitable organizations, who then use them to win money in the receipt lottery. These two 85 stores, however, took the receipts, fished out the big ones, and then presented them to the tax office as receipts for canceled orders -- which lowered their incomes and saved them thousands of Taiwan dollars.

The tax office became suspicious and sent operatives to the stores, who purchased items worth NT$500 and put the receipts in the charity box. However, before they did so, they photographed them. Busted!

85C has been in trouble over the years for other issues. A while back they got sued by a youth employment advocacy group for not paying the labor insurance for some of their young employees, which also claims that they underpay their workers. 85C sent them a legal warning over the latter claim. Then there was the issue of "future cakes" at the end of last year -- if you went into certain stores after 8 pm, it was said, you could buy a cake with the next day's date on it.

Whatever the case, I'll never look at those ubiquitous collection boxes the same way again. Sad.

[Taiwan]

Old dilemmas

After a couple of years with teenagers, I've discovered the difference between raising teenagers and raising children. As parents, when you raise children, you are always congratulating one another:

"Look honey, he can ride a bike!"
"Great work darling! I'm so proud of him"

"Darling! She's writing her ABCs already!"
"Wonderful! I know you put a lot of effort into teaching her that!"

"Did you see her beautiful drawing of a dinosaur?"
"Our daughter is soooo talented!"

But when you raise teenagers, you're always consoling one another:

"But he only eats meat and starches."
"It's ok. At least he's not bulimic."

"She made up her hair so she looks just like Avril Lavigne!"
"It could be worse, dear. It could be Britney Spears."

"He spends all his time on the computer making Lego videos!"
"Well, at least he isn't looking at Japanese bukkake porn."

However, reaching the age where we are taking care of teenagers means we are also reaching the age where we are racking our brains over what to do about our parents....

My wife's parents are salt-of-the-earth Taiwanese of their generation. My father in law was educated in electrical engineering under the Japanese and served in the Imperial Japanese Army. He then spent many years working for China Shipbuilding. Both are from old established families in Lukang. And both face dilemmas common to old people in Taiwan.

Like many Taiwanese their age, they were ripped off in the numerous Ponzi and pyramid schemes that proliferated in Taiwan during the bubble era of the late 1980s. In their case it was a 'friend' who ripped off their life savings for investment in the famous H scam (I'm not naming it publicly), served a brief prison sentence, and is now enjoying my in-laws' hard-earned cash. They used to go stand in front of his house periodically for years afterwards, silently begging him to return the cash...

...the H officials -- it was an established company -- recently met with the victims. They are unable to compensate them, but they did offer them spaces in the linguta, repositories where the ashes of the dead are kept (columbaria, I think they are called).

Immediately the scammers moved in. After all, the list of H victims is basically a list of people with proven ability to be scammed. For just NT$50K, they promised that they would sell the linguta spaces. My father in law immediately went for it, and another $50K vanished from his accounts. Finally my wife intervened and told him she would sell them on the internet. And sure enough, if you get on Yahoo and search for linguta spaces, you'll find the children of these victims selling the spaces so that 'their parents will have the peace of providing for their children' when they die. For the elderly burned in this and numerous other scams, the humiliation is double: not merely being victimized, but leaving nothing to the next generation as they are supposed to.

My in-laws also face another problem that many Taipei residents of their generation face: the pointlessness of a home sale. The luxury property they bought in Yungho the 1970s is now an aging, crappy, cramped house on a very expensive plot of land two minutes walk from the Dingxi metro stop. They could, in today's depressed markets, probably get $3.5-$3.8 million for the place. But because the land is so valuable, land taxes will eat over $2 million (land taxes are fixed by bureaucratic diktat in Taiwan). Hence there is no financial incentive for them to sell, since what they get after taxes would only support them for a couple of years. That is one reason why, in the heart of so many Taiwan cities, on valuable and useful urban land, sit row after row of ugly, downtrodden two and three story homes, unrenewed and unrebuilt.

Fortunately, a local development company has offered to purchase the property in a very common arrangement: they swap the house for a new flat in the apartment building that will be built on the spot. During the construction period, the company will pay for an apartment in the area for my in-laws. It's a sweet deal that benefits everyone, within the framework of a system rigged to favor developers and the construction industry.

Not all the elderly are so lucky, and so many of them face dilemmas like those of my in-laws.

[Taiwan]

Taiwanese arrested in Hong Kong Phone Scam

The other day my wife got a call from a woman claiming to be from Taishin Bank, who said someone, Mrs. X, was trying to clear out the $900,000 we have there. Except we don't have an account there.... The woman spoke in mandarin with a Taiwan accent, but after a few minutes as my wife drew her out, interested to see how the scammer was going to get her to an ATM, her mandarin quickly became more like mainland style. After they switched my wife to "the manager" my wife could hear others in the background of what was obviously a single large room, reading from the same script in mainland-accented Chinese, telling others that Mrs. X was cleaning out their $900K at Taishin Bank...

The Straits Times reports on the successful prosecution of a Taiwanese in connection with the kidnap scams that have become in vogue in Asia over the last few years. In these a caller pretending to be a kidnapper of your child demands that money be transferred immediately to an account. In the background you can hear the tearful voice of your child. We've gotten kidnapping scam calls several times, with "my son" in the background calling for me in Chinese, a language he doesn't speak. The Straits Times reports:

These scams involve callers pretending to have kidnapped a victim's relative and demanding a money transfer. They are rampant worldwide.

Between last August and May 9 this year, 15 people here have been conned of more than $150,000 with these scams. They lost between $500 and $49,000 each.

When the scams first surfaced last August, 20 cases were reported. This grew to 186 in last month alone.

Taiwanese Lee Chin Lung, 36, was not one of the masterminds, but was used as a conduit, transferring money to beneficiaries in China.

According to Deputy Public Prosecutor Hon Yi, Lee had responded to a job advertisement in Taiwan and was flown here on Dec 16 by his 'Big Boss'. Here, he met another man, known to him only as Ah Kai, who told him they were in the soccer betting business.

Ah Kai said he needed bank accounts into which punters who had sustained losses could make payments.

He told Lee to look for Chinese nationals with bank accounts here and to withdraw and deliver the money to him.

Lee found three willing parties. In a span of about three weeks, a total of $77,500 was deposited into their accounts. Lee then withdrew and remitted the money to various beneficiaries in China.

Details of the scam came out in court last Wednesday, when Lee pleaded guilty and was jailed for 18 months.

So many in Taiwan have been hurt by these scams, which are especially common when schools open after summer vacation, since kids go off to new schools that their parents are not familiar with. It is a public disgrace that the government has not been more aggressive in warning the public about them. A sustained campaign would have little cost but would return immense benefits to the public.

[Taiwan]

Those Stimulating Market Rip-offs

Now that the price of everything is going up, rip-offs in the markets are on the rise. The same one struck our family this week in distant morning markets in Taichung and Yungho. My father in law, who is over 80 and no longer clear in his mind, came home from the market the other day to find that NT$85 in change was just a handful of old coins, no longer in use, that the vendor had cunningly substituted for current money, taking advantage of the failing memory of an old man. How do such people live with themselves?

And just today my wife stopped off at a morning market on the corner of Dongshan and Jungong roads on the border of Taichung city. The vendor gave her the 1973 $5 coin with the Dead Mass Murderer on it imaged above, because in size and weight it resembles the $50 coin she should have received. 'Course my son was delighted with the old coin....

Watch out for this one folks!

[Taiwan]

Taiwanese Fraud Gangs Spread the Love Across Asia

For quite some time now I've been arguing that the government needs to do more about the local fraud gangs that operate in conjunction with Chinese gangs and use the latest technology to carry out their operations. Now the Asahi Shimbun complains that gangs from Taiwan are operating all over Asia -- including a few based in my own Taichung (full apologies to all):

Taiwan has apparently become a stronghold of telephone fraud cases that have spread in some Asian countries.

Late last year, Taiwanese police arrested two men, aged 29 and 35, in connection with telephone fraud cases. At that time, police officers were surprised to see that the suspects had been committing crimes in Asian countries by subtly using high-tech tools from Taiwan.

The two, who were members of a group based in Taichung city in central Taiwan, allegedly defrauded TW$100 million (about 370 million yen) from hundreds of people living mainly in China, South Korea and Thailand.

According to the police, the two men bought several mobile phones overseas in order to make it hard for Taiwanese police to track them. Then, using the mobile phones, other high-tech devices and discount Internet Protocol (IP) telephone lines, they built a system that enabled them to automatically make bulk calls or inundate computers with e-mail messages.

They also recorded fake messages in several languages with the help of collaborators in Taiwan, China, South Korea and Thailand. For instance, one of the messages said, "Your telephone fee has not been paid yet."

The two kept sending such messages around the clock from Taiwan to other areas. When someone replied, they asked the person to transfer money from an ATM or a post office to an account opened under a fictitious name. One of the accounts was named, "Finance management bureau's joint account."

According to the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) of Taiwan, telephone scams started in Taiwan in the late 1990s and escalated into a serious social problem in 2000.

Also around the same year, some groups in Taiwan started to relocate their bases across the sea to Amoy in mainland China's Fujian province, and have since cheated people in and around the city in a similar manner in cooperation with local Chinese.

In recent years, such groups have made inroads into South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines, CIB officials said.

Here a local social problem has grown to have Asian implications that reflect negatively on The Beautiful Isle. Somebody needs to do something....

[Taiwan] [China] [East Asia] [Korea] [Japan]

Serving Your Prison Sentence, Taiwan style

In Taiwan, beating the system is an art form, one that depends on exploitation of the willingness of other human beings to take a hit, sweetened with a little cash or mediated by filial piety. For example, gangsters use the ID cards of homeless people to open bank accounts that they use in scams. Similarly, one way parents beat the traffic camera system is to have their children who do not drive take the drivers test, and then take the blame when the parent is photographed speeding. But this habit of better living through human sacrifice reached a new creative milestone this week when a hemophiliac revealed that he'd been used by criminals to take their prison sentences....

The Ministry of Justice is investigating the claims of a man who said that he stood in for a number of criminals by appearing for them at trial and serving their prison sentences.

The man, who suffers from severe hemophilia, said he was willing to take the blame for other people's crimes because he knew he would be released early from the prison sentences as a result of his poor health.

Department of Corrections Director Shaw Ming-yi (蕭明毅) yesterday told a press conference that the man, Kuo Rong-hui (郭榮輝), 35, had been sentenced to a total of 36 years and six months in jail for a number of crimes, including offenses against public safety, theft, using and selling drugs and violations of gun, explosives and knife regulations.

Shaw said that Kuo had been released early from prison repeatedly because of his hemophilia, adding that Kuo had, for example, entered prison in late 2002 and been released for medical treatment on March 2003.

Shaw said that Kuo's condition required treatment amounting to NT$60,000 (US$1,800) per week, which the prisons could not afford.

The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister newspaper) yesterday reported that Kuo had confessed in an interview to taking the place of a number of criminals at trial and in prison.

The Liberty Times reporter had interviewed Kuo at his home after a judge told the journalist about his suspicion that Kuo could be involved in a scam.

Kuo told the reporter that his criminal record listed about 90 crimes, of which about 70 were committed by other people.

He said that he had received NT$300,000 from each offender to take the consequences for their crimes and had once received NT$12 million from a drug smuggler.

Kuo said that since he had gotten away with the scam so many times, many gangsters had approached him for his service.

Kuo on Tuesday attended a trial at the Banciao District Court on charges of possession of two pistols. Another suspect had been charged with possessing a third pistol in the same case.

Kuo told the court that all three pistols were his and that the other suspect was innocent.

The court said it did not believe Kuo's claim and the judge had become suspicious.

The Liberty Times report prompted a police investigation, with Minister of Justice Morley Shih (施茂林) yesterday saying authorities were taking the matter very seriously because it has implications on the work of police officers, prosecutors and judges.

Banciao District Prosecutors' Office spokesman Huang Yu-yuan (黃玉垣) yesterday said that Banciao prosecutors had arrested Kuo while his claims were under investigation.

The paper doesn't really say it straight out, though it hints at it, that somewhere in the system, people have to be on the take in order for such scams to work.

[Taiwan]

Taiwan 419 Scams

The 419 letter repository blog had this today:

MRHUANG CHILIN LETTER TO YOU

From: JTERRAhoustonrrcom - houagchilin@yahoo.com.tw

I am Mr.Huang Chi-Lin.I work with Sino Pac Bank, formerly known as International Bank of Taipei as General Manager, Northern Branches, Taiwan. I have an obscure business proposal for you. My client, Mr.Thabit Alwan an Iraqi Merchant, made a fixed deposit of 17.3mUSD for 18 months with my bank.

Upon maturity several notices were sent to him.

It was later discovered that he and his family were killed in Iraq war living no living witness to this fund.If you are interest I will like you as a foreigner to stand as next of kin so we can receive his....

419 scams, as these scams are known, are a common sight on the internet. You'd think by now that people would have wised up, but there is a sucker born every minute, apparently, for scammers all over the world make a good living from them. For more on 419 scams, visit the informative and entertaining 419eater.com, where people make a hobby out of baiting scammers. Don't miss the Trophy Room there.

[Taiwan]

Thieves and Scams

Scams are a way of life on the Beautiful Isle. Yesterday my neighbor stopped by and she and my wife fell to discussing some that had happened to her. An old woman who collects recycling stuff and sells it to get by, she hardly has a cent, but nevertheless, thieves have ransacked her house twice.

She also got a phone call from a scammer a while back. The scammer called her son and told him he was massively in debt and that it had to be paid at once and in full. They got all panicky -- one trick the scammers use is to get you all panicky -- and rushed out the door. But there was more! Incredibly, the scammers had told them that they had to take a backpack of a certain color, and that they had to keep the line open all the way to the bank. Despite discussion of such scams every day in the papers, they fell for it.

They drove to the bank, the mother holding the cellphone and keeping the line open. When they got there, another Hero Teller immediately identified this tale as a scam. In another interesting psychological twist, they started to argue with the Teller. She argued back, and called for a policeman who happened to be making his rounds and had stopped by the bank. When the policeman came over, the scammer on the line hung up instantly.

Not only did they have someone on the phone, they also had someone in the bank. An acquaintance of mine used to actually do scams of this nature, and he said that they operate in gangs of 50-60. The gang as a whole made money, but being on the bottom, he only got a tiny taste each time. So he left the gang...

[Taiwan] [corruption]

Scams Again

There's a strain of thought that argues that Taiwan's international status is really not a big issue -- the island can pursue some postmodern, Stainless Steel Rat status. I was reflecting on that today while watching the Rebar case shenanigans, as fugitive tycoon Wang You-theng, dodging Taiwan police, left Singapore for the US, once again out of reach of the impotent Taiwan government officials who cannot do anything because they lack diplomatic standing.

Little people too are affected by the lack of diplomatic status, and nowhere more than in the activities of the infamous scammers who are based in China but who operate in conjunction with local Taiwan gangsters. They prey on the old, always attempting to create panic in them, so that they will unthinkingly turn over account data to the scammers, who then clean it out.

My mother in law, almost 70, told me she gets at least one scam phone call each day, but today she got a beaut that caught even her hardened self. The caller identified himself as a "telephone company policeman" who told her that her personal data had been hijacked by scammers and used to open a bogus phone account for scammers. The caller had all her data, including her national ID number, account numbers, and phone account history. He explained that he needed some additional data, including amounts of money, as well as the ability to access the accounts, so that in the event that the police froze them for being involved in a scam, she could get them unfrozen and continue to use the money. My mother in law fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and only the timely arrival of my sister in law stopped her from giving everything up to the scammers.

Someone pointed out to me the other day that the scammer problem is an excellent political issue that the DPP could make progress on. There's nothing to be done about the lack of cooperation from our obdurate neighbor across the Taiwan Strait, but surely the government could start an all-out program of education and warning. Every day the papers are filled with tales of retirees cheated out of a lifetime of savings. It's time this nonsense was stopped by cutting off the supply of victims, even if we can't reach the perps.

[Taiwan] [China]