Eight arrested in multimillion dollar telecom fraud case

Police in Taiwan have broken up a telecom fraud case in which a university professor on the mainland was scammed out of around 18 million yuan ($2.6 million), according to a report from China News Service.

The report said Taiwan police arrested eight people who were suspected members of a fraud ring in Taiwan on Wednesday.

The report cited other Taiwan media saying the professor, surnamed Huang, from prestigious Tsinghua University, reported to police in Beijing in July that she was scammed out of 17.6 million yuan by a group of phone swindlers disguised as officials from law enforcement and judicial departments.

Police in Taiwan discovered that some of the money swindled from Huang was withdrawn from ATMs in Taiwan and some was transferred through online banking services. The transactions were found using IPs registered in Taiwan.

Police arrested the suspects in an office building in Taichung City on Wednesday and gathered evidence at the scene including internet equipment and software for money transfers.

The large amount of money involved attracted wide public attention to the case.

According to the Ministry of Public Security, more than 7,600 organized telecom fraud rings were broken up last year. In these cases, 561 suspects have been brought to the mainland from other countries including Kenya, Laos and Malaysia. Among them, 219 are Taiwan residents.

More than 100 million yuan has been returned to victims, the ministry said.

In 2015, a series of telecom frauds nationwide netted 22.2 billion yuan. Half the money flowed into bank accounts in Taiwan, and so far only a fraction of the total amount has been recovered, leaving many families destitute.

In April 2015, police in Guizhou province broke up China’s biggest single case of telecom fraud, in which 117 million yuan of public money was taken from the construction bureau of the Economic Development Zone in Duyun city.