China blames Taiwan criminals for surge in telephone scams

Description

"Most of the people they are arresting are the mules," said Lennon Chang, a criminologist and expert in telecoms fraud at Monash University in Melbourne. "They are not the real leaders or heads of the criminal organized syndicates."

Chang said that telecoms fraud took hold in Taiwan in the early 1990s, before a crackdown
prompted scammers to shift operations to Xiamen, a port in southeastern China that is just a few kilometers from the Taiwancontrolled island of Kinmen. There, fraudsters could pick up Taiwan mobile phone signals to call Taiwanese victims, hiding behind the lack of law enforcement cooperation across the Taiwan Strait. 

Later they began targeting the mainland, said Chang, but as the authorities in Taiwan and
China began to collaborate the gangs were pushed to third countries, aided by advances in
technology and moving frequently to make evidence collection harder.