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TAIPEI: Nearly 600 people, mostly Taiwanese and Chinese, were rounded up across Asia for suspected massive online fraud in a rare example of regional police coordination, officials said Friday.
Taiwanese police said 598 suspects, including 410 Taiwanese and 181 Chinese nationals, were nabbed in a carefully planned operation involving law enforcers from half a dozen countries.
They were detained in Taiwan, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand on Thursday for allegedly running Internet and telephone scams mainly targeting mainland Chinese, said Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau.
“This will deal a heavy blow to the fraud rings and help substantially reduce fraud cases,” said Taiwan's police chief Wang Cho-chiun.
“This was also the first time Taiwan and China police jointly investigated cases in a third country and we believe this will set an example in joint crime-fighting,” he told reporters.
Details of the scams are sketchy and appeared to have varied from country to country, but police believe thousands of people were taken in.
In Taiwan alone, more than 800 policemen were mobilised to arrest suspected local swindlers, with Tw$1.33 million ($458,000) in cash confiscated.
In Indonesia and Cambodia, 177 and 166 people respectively were held. Taiwan said it expected Cambodia to deport many of the detainees to the island later Friday.
Cambodia's Interior Ministry said in a statement the crackdown was made “in collaboration with the ministry of public security of the People's Republic of China”.
The nationwide raids in Cambodia followed numerous victim complaints, a police spokesman said, adding that the suspects had “many tricks” to extort funds.
In Malaysia, police on Borneo island arrested 27 Chinese and 10 Taiwanese for allegedly duping people into paying fake traffic fines, the official news agency Bernama and New Straits Times daily reported.
The group in Malaysia is accused of calling individuals in China and telling them they had been issued a traffic summons, asking them to pay money into an online account to settle the fine or face court action.
Thai police said they had arrested four suspects, one Taiwanese woman and three Thais, in raids on seven locations in Bangkok based on information provided by Taiwanese police.
The element of surprise was key for the scam artists, said police there. “The two main tricks are to surprise the victim, for instance by telling them they have won the lottery, or to frighten them by saying their bank account or credit card was suspended,” said Colonel Phanthana Nutchanart.
Taiwanese fraud rings have recently relocated to Southeast Asia after the island's police joined forces with Chinese authorities to bust their operations.
Jakarta's police chief Sutarman, who goes by one name, said Chinese and Taiwanese had been arrested in 15 different locations in the Indonesian capital “following requests by Chinese and Taiwanese police”.
He said the suspects would rent houses with broadband access and make phone calls over the Internet “to many victims in China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam in which they posed as an official to extort money”.
