Fraud suspects returned to Taiwan on charter flight for 1st time

Taipei, June 11 (CNA) - A group of 122 Taiwanese fraud suspects were flown back to Taipei from Macau on a private EVA Airways flight early Saturday, marking the first time in Taiwan's crime-fighting history that a chartered plane was used to transport suspected criminals.

They were all arrested in Cambodia in a joint regional crime-fighting operation on Thursday, in which a total of 598 suspects, including 410 Taiwanese and 181 Chinese nationals, were nabbed.

The suspects were rounded up in Taiwan, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand for allegedly operating Internet and telephone scams mainly targeting Chinese and Taiwanese, according to the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB).

Taiwan fraud suspects deported from Cambodia

2011/06/11
New Straits Times (Singapore)

The 122 suspects, detained Thursday in a rare co-ordinated police operation across several Asian countries, landed in Taiwan early Saturday and were taken to a police centre for questioning, said the Criminal Investigation Bureau. 

TAIPEI: More than 120 Taiwanese nationals arrested in Cambodia on suspicion of fraud were deported to Taiwan Saturday for further investigation, police on the island said.

They were among nearly 600 people, including 410 Taiwanese and 181 Chinese, rounded up across the region for allegedly running Internet and telephone scams mainly targeting mainland Chinese, according to the bureau.

Details of the scams are sketchy and appeared to have varied from country to country, but police believe thousands of people were taken in.

Taiwanese fraud rings have recently relocated to Southeast Asia after the island’s police joined forces with Chinese authorities to bust their operations.

China 'fake fines' gang members arrested across Asia

The suspects are likely to be sent back to China and Taiwan for trial

10 June 2011
BBC News

Hundreds of Chinese and Taiwanese citizens have been arrested in countries throughout Asia over a scam involving fake fines.

Police say the suspects contacted people in China and Taiwan and extorted money from them by claiming they had been issued with court summonses.

Some 170 suspects were held in Indonesia, and 166 more were arrested in Cambodia.

There were also arrests in Thailand and the Malaysian city of Kota Kinabalu.

NBI: Chinese syndicate using banking system for fraud

Thursday, December 30, 2010
By Macon Ramos Araneta
Manila Standard Today (Philippines)

THE Chinese syndicate that has collected P6 billion in six months of operations in the Philippines operates elsewhere in Southeast Asia apart from China, an NBI official said Wednesday.

The Internet and credit card syndicate led by Wei Hao Lo has defrauded many people in China and Taiwan, and some of the passports confiscated from arrested syndicate members show that they have been to Thailand, says case officer Norman Anire.

Cesar Bacani, head of the National Bureau of Investigation’s Anti-Fraud and Action Division, said the syndicate’s members could also be operating in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

“But as of this time, what we have established is their operation in the Philippines and in mainland China, where five safe houses were raided by local authorities simultaneous with the raids on his eight safe houses in the [Philippines],” Bacani told the Manila Standard.

“The raids in China led to the arrest of around 100 members of Lo’s syndicate.”

Based on the statements from Chinese police and Chinese Embassy officials, the syndicate’s members operate by contacting potential victims and telling them that they are under investigation for smuggling, money-laundering or overdrawing their credit cards, and that they will soon be summoned to court.

The targets will then be called by other syndicate members before being ordered to open a new account via on-line banking and transfer their money to that account, and to reveal the account number. The syndicate members will then withdraw the money in the Philippines via ATM.

Bacani said some victims were sometimes ordered to go to Macau and then to mail their ATM card to the Philippines.

“They have the telephone directory,” he said.

“Majority of the victims are picked by chance, but many of them are Chinese retirees and some are even relatives of ranking officials in China.”

Bacani said the syndicate’s style was similar to the text scam in the Philippines, where a potential victim is instructed to deposit a certain amount to an account number to be able to claim a prize worth millions of pesos that he or she supposedly has won.

“But the only difference is that in the Philippines, the fraudsters do not harass or intimidate the would-be victims contrary to what Lo’s group has been doing,” he said.

The syndicate’s members intimidate targets in mainland China and Taiwan by introducing themselves as a judge, prosecutor, police officer or a member of the jury, and then shaking them down for money.

Counterfeit drugs: Scientists call on Asia to cooperate more

Artesunate and amodiaquine pills (Photo: AFP)

PARIS (AFP) — Scientists lifting the veil on a sting operation that netted drugs counterfeiters in China said on Tuesday it was vital for Asia's police and pharmaceutical watchdogs to work more closely in tackling these dangerous cheats.

In a paper published in the US online journal the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the scientists describe an unprecedented undercover mission that led to the arrest of a Chinese gang peddling fake anti-malaria pills.

Bogus treatments for malaria are rampant in Southeast Asia, placing lives at risk, they warn.

These pills are unlikely to contain enough artesunate -- the active ingredient that kills resistant malaria parasites in the blood -- and may even contain toxic substances that could sicken or kill the patient.

The investigation, dubbed Operation Jupiter, was coordinated with the help of Interpol and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Lab experts with Britain's University of Oxford and Wellcome Trust analysed 391 samples of genuine and counterfeit artesunate, collected in Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and on the Thai-Myanmar border.

They used a spectrometer to get a chemical ID of the pills and found that 195 out of 391 samples -- 49.9 percent -- had no or only small amounts of artesunate.

They also put the pills' packaging through a battery of tests, finding changes in hologram seals that, only to the expert eye and with the help of a microscope and ultraviolet light, pointed to fakery.

Many of the fake seals bore the logo "Guilin Pharma," the name of a large pharmaceutical company in Guilin, southern China.

But the ace in the hole was to use a high-technique called forensic polynology that not only found minute traces of pollen in the samples but identified their origin.

At least some of the counterfeit artesunate came from southern China, and this was supported by examination of the mineral calcite, found in some of the samples.

Armed with this information, the Jupiter chiefs handed the evidence to China's ministry of public security in March 2006.

A police swoop netted a suspect in Yunnan province who had bought a quarter of a million fake "Guilin Pharma" blister packs from a man with a counterfeit factory in Guangdong province. The suspects are awaiting trial.

The packs had been sold across the border in Myanmar and probably accounted for as many as the genuine Guilin Pharma treatments sold there.

The paper says the unique collaboration between forensic scientists, detectives, doctors and pharmacists should be the model for future offensives against the scourge of counterfeit drugs.

But, they say, "there are very few laboratories (only one in Asia/Pacific) with the appropropriate reference collection [of genuine drugs] and ability to analyse pollen assemblages in tablets, and the work is very labour-intensive and specialised and therefore expensive."

"If a collaborative forensive approach is to succeeed, DRAs (drug regulatory authorities) and their international collaborations will need to be strengthened and regional laboratories able to provide actionable evidence will be required."

The problem of counterfeit artesunate in Southeast Asia first surfaced in 1998. Among the many concerns raised by this traffic is the fear that, by taking an insufficient dose of artesunate, patients will help the malaria parasite to become resistant to the only widely-available, cost-effective drug.