Concern about Cambodia Deporting Taiwanese Scammers to China

[CEOCambodiaNews]

‘Grave Concern’ as Cambodia Deports Taiwanese Alleged Scammers to China

The deportations raise questions about Taiwan’s ability to participate in joint investigations with Asian trade partners.
By Nick Aspinwall
December 15, 2018

Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) expressed “grave concern and deep regret” last week after Cambodia deported 46 Republic of China (ROC) citizens accused of telecom fraud to China.

According to Taiwan’s Central News Agency, MOFA spokesperson Andrew Lee said that while Taiwan’s regional representative office immediately called for the suspects to be repatriated to Taiwan, Cambodia instead heeded a request from Beijing to send them to China, a close ally, in accordance with its support of the One China principle.

It’s the latest instance of Taiwan’s struggle to participate in regional joint crime-fighting as it bolsters its ties with neighboring South and Southeast Asian countries via President Tsai Ing-wen’s signature New Southbound Policy, which aims to deepen economic ties with regional neighbors and lessen the island’s reliance on trade with China. While the policy is limited by the fact that no country in Asia has formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan, states like Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines have long had de facto representative offices, generally billed as economic and trade bureaus, in Taipei.
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Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), which is responsible for cross-strait policy, said it has asked China to provide personal information and secure visitation rights for the 46 recently deported Taiwanese citizens. Chinese authorities, however, often reject visitation requests. The wife of Lee Ming-che, a Taiwanese activist imprisoned in China for “subverting state power,” went months without being granted visitation rights, although the MAC has said she will visit her husband next week.

This is far from the first time Taiwanese crime suspects, usually accused of telecom fraud and often working in conjunction with Chinese nationals, have been deported to China. Taiwanese telecom scammers have operated for decades, targeting potential victims throughout the Chinese-speaking world and demanding payments or access to personal bank accounts. Since the mid-2000s, however, a domestic crackdown has led to their dispersal throughout Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, and to locales as far-flung as Armenia, Spain and Kenya, all of which have deported groups of Taiwanese fraud suspects to China in the past three years.

Beijing, which does not recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty, maintains that Taiwanese scamming suspects are Chinese nationals. In many cases, the fraudsters target people living in China and travel using false Chinese documents. This leads to the issue often being cast as a matter of troubled cross-strait relations, and Taiwanese officials have chastised Beijing for not exchanging information in good faith. “Our difficulty at the moment is that mainland China doesn’t want to work with us,” anti-fraud researcher Chan Chih-wen of Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau told the Associated Press in March 2018.

Chan said at the time that some Taiwanese fraudsters are university students who may not be fully aware they are committing crimes. “Some younger people will think, ‘Wow, I can go there and earn some money and even have fun,’” he told the AP. Taiwan’s MOFA has warned potential overseas fraud suspects they may wind up in Chinese prisons, where they have received sentences of up to 10 years.
https://thediplomat.com/2018/12/grave-c ... -to-china/