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. They were detained in Taiwan, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand Thursday for allegedly running Internet and telephone scams mainly targeting mainland Chinese. “This will deal a heavy blow to the fraud rings and help substantially reduce fraud cases,” said Taiwan's police chief Wang Cho-chiun. In Taiwan alone, more than 800 policemen were mobilized to arrest suspected local swindlers, with $458,000 in cash confiscated. In Indonesia and Cambodia, 177 and 166 people respectively were held. The nationwide raids in Cambodia followed numerous victim complaints, a police spokesman said. Jakarta's police chief Sutarman said 76 Chinese and 101 Taiwanese nationals 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”. 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. The element of surprise was key for the scam artists, said police in Thailand, who found 43 ATM cards, more than 20 mobile phones and bank account details in their raids.
