well,a sordid saga! in short, i lent quite an amount to a lady whom I thought was a friend. These days she has stopped taking calls, though i tried from different numbers. Almost 3 months like that phone ringing but no one answering. :fume:
The lady in question is taiwanese and is working as english teacher in a bushiban and kindergarten in taichung and goes by the name Lisa Chen.Basically from Jhubei, Hsinchu.
Any idea what should be my next course of action? Is it advisable to contact police here? :help:
Next thing she does is run of to china!
Post a paper at her School that says she owns you the amount of money, she’ll lose face. Maybe it does the trick.
Maybe you could call her school and tell the owner that she’s in debt with you.
The ploice will not help as it is not a criminal matter.
It’s a civil matter so you would ahve to go to a civil claims court.
I hope you have something in writing… otherwise it will be very difficult.
[quote=“belgian pie”]Next thing she does is run of to China!
Post a paper at her School that says she owns you the amount of money, she’ll lose face. Maybe it does the trick.
Maybe you could call her school and tell the owner that she’s in debt with you.[/quote]
Post a paper that you cant prove and get your arse sued for libel… 
Call her school and they will quite rightly tell you it’s none of their business :loco:
No, but than they know what kind of person she is!
She is soooo going to lose face.
It doesn’t matter what he does, the money is gone anyway.
Like my mom always said, neither a borrower nor a lender be.
Sorry, I’m a smart ass.
I’d go there and say that you’ve come to collect $$$ that is owed, you know, matter of factly when co-workers ask why you are there. Take a book, sit down, wait…
No slander, no libel, but still the end result of BIG FACE loss. 
disclaimer: If your ass gets kicked, ends up in jail, or anything bad happens… this was just my opinion and not any direction for you.
I was thinking the same thing. Why can’t you just go see her at work?
What the hell are you on about now? It was MY mum who said that.
no need to apologize. So am I.
Search the archives for the phrase “debtor boy” and you will find information on how I sued an unsavory individual who did basically the same thing. I think you might have greater success as I assume a Taiwanese national would not be able to hide behind a corrupt ambassador, nor would she be able to bring in every priest and nun within a 50 mile radius. (Lesson: check out the woman’s guanxi first. If she has connections and knows how to pull strings, the facts of the matter will be irrelevant.)
You can, BTW, bring criminal charges against her for fraud. Just front up at your local police station and be ready to convince them to take your statement. Took me about half an hour to get them to take it seriously, but after that they did.
Do you know anyone who knows her? Talk to that person(s) privately. Ask them whether they have lent any money to her, too. Try to find out as much as you can.
Perhaps she will come back eventually and return the money. I have had the same problem ages ago and I got the money back, but it took quite some time.
Police won’t help, the “let’s make her loose face”-advice neither.
Don’t know about ironlady’s advice, but definitely don’t do anything stupid, beware of the guanxi.
One more point – after going through the Taiwanese court system, with a very disappointing outcome due to guanxi and nothing more (an appeal that according to several experts should not even have been heard as Debtor Boy failed to show up for the first court hearing) – I did feel a small twinge of regret that I didn’t take up my ex-boss on his offer to beat the guy’s face in. Now, I’m not a violent person, and I really couldn’t condone having someone beaten up even in this sort of situation, but I have to admit that there is a part of me that had to reluctantly recognize that in this particular situation, it might have been more efficient at leading to the same result. 
So, two questions: know any taxi drivers who moonlight? And does she? It’s all a balance of guanxi. Facts, schmacts. Who do you know?
Is it just me? I think you did the wrong thing naming her and saying where she is from on an internet forum. Although having the family name Chen is reasonably close to anonymity.
A sizable amount means different things to different people. I lent a friend a sizable amount for me when I first arrived in Taiwan. Two years later it became a very small amount which I still have never received back. The off to China thing did happen in this case. Sorry, if I’m trivialising the whole issue.
The specific amount is irrelevant. The point is that you try to help someone out and then they turn around and $hit on you. And then you try to go through appropriate channels and again you are $hat on. And then to top it off, people on Internet fora tell you to just forget about it.
well,contacting her school or going there is out coz I don’t know her school. All I know is her phone number her car registration and that she has a company of some sort which supplies gas to Hsinchu Science Park.(thatz what she told).
Then there is another angle. I don’t know if something has happened to her. If she wants to avoid me, why didn’t she change her phone number? Her phone is charged regularly and it isn’t even switched off even if I call 20 times. I guess she takes calls if only in her addressbook.
I named her in the post in the remote hope that someone here knows her, no intention to slander. she has a canadian boyfriend in Taipei. well,thatz a lot of info, I know… 
I dont think she has connections…seemed like a simple person before…
The money is quite a good sum,even if she refuses to give it back, I want to know why she did this to me.She literally begged me when she wanted money.
Is it possible to get some info from her mobile phone provider?
To buy her boyfriend a new phone or laptop?
Let me tell you this, it’s more common in Taiwan than you would expect.
A lot of people in Taiwan want show face but don’t have the money, so they go out and borrow from whoever they can get it from. Let it be friends, family, mafia, whoever.
Lot’s of people are in deep moneyshit, they move overnight to a new address and … gone they are. They change phonenumbers too.
I worked for someone I thought I could trust but in the end it came out that he was so deep in money trouble that I couldn’t believe it. He invited all time friends and family for dinners and stuff, so nobody ever assumed that this was going on.
I did a good job there but it’s too late to change anything, to late to get the company running again. I guess he started getting into trouble as he moved to a bigger factory and the China thing became bigger and more competitive more difficult to get orders at the price he set.
Anyway, before he fled to china i got friends of mine tell me that they loaned him money as they thought it would be OK because I was working there. They always asked me how business was going, it was doing fine but i didn’t control the money. Just got new orders coming in.
Finally he had to keep his daughter from school as he was afraid she’d get kidnapped, his wife couldn’t go out any time of day. He changed phone numbers 4 times or so. In 6 months he moved three times, always at night. Everytime he moved into a smaller place so everytime he had to leave part of raw materials behind.
Our last project could’ve been a big one if he hadn’t screwed it up. By than he had a borrowed from a friend in shanghai whom we where working with on this project, as he had a factory in China that could pull this one of. On production time he told me that i shouldn’t come to Shanghai, that he could do all the quality control etc… yeah my ars, over 50 % faulty I was later told by the customer. but by than I wasn’t working for him anymore.
But after the production he came back to Taiwan, phoned me with the explanaition that we had to meet, talk about the future and that he would pay me. Yeah right … this was the day after Xmass, 2003, so … next day I call him for a meeting …Uh … phone canceled … where does he live? He never told me his latest adres, so there I am. He needed to pay me 5000-6000 US$ and i don’t know where the guy is … hmmm … OK call Shanghai a few days later … oyeah he was here, just came in yesterday to pick up the money, our commission. But they didn’t know where he lived in shanghai, the wife and daughter were there too.
Can you imagine … these people were good friends of my wife … and later of mine … did a lot of stuff together … they go out and borrow from our friends and family … than dissapears. My wife told me to just let it go … right … one day i’m in Shanghai and will find the guy … believe me
:fume:
Side note … even his family (father, mother …) and in-laws don’t want anything to do with them anymore.
Is he happier, is he going to succeed in China … don’t believe so … he’s going to do the same thing there … and he has 1 million Taiwanese to borrow money from …
[quote=“ironlady”]The specific amount is irrelevant. The point is that you try to help someone out and then they turn around and $hit on you. And then you try to go through appropriate channels and again you are $hat on. And then to top it off, people on Internet fora tell you to just forget about it. [/quote] Not sure if this was aimed at me but I didn’t say or mean to imply forget about it as that would be hypocritical. I’m still owed money by the person I lent money too. I certainly haven’t forgottten as it was five years ago.
Wow, BP, I had no idea how wide-spread this behaviour was (is). I can relate to your stories on so many levels.
A former boss of mine is the same way. Did the Shanghai thing and is now back in Taipei, ducking phone calls, changing names, genuinely shocked when people get upset when they don’t get paid. What a horse’s arse.
My g/f’s Dad is, also, the same way. Constantly treating half her hometown to extravagant dinners, then just signs the bill with his home addy and walks out. The restaurant laoban show’s up a couple of hours later to say WTF and he tells him than his loan will be coming in anyday now and he will pay them then. I hope he takes off to China. It would cause us a whole lot less stress in our relationship.
The advice of “just forget it” seems to be best to me. Just learn from the experiences talked about in this thread. and;
CYA.
Call me cheap, but I am not lending anyone anything and I will not freely proffer trust as I have been wont to do in the past. No, sir. All laobans are guilty until proven innocent.
That goes for foreign ones as well.
Taiwan has beaten the trust outta me.
A wise person (Don’t know who, I don’t think it was me) once said “If you want to lose a friend, lend them money.”
Not helpful in this case I know, but still a lesson we can all learn.
Nah, lots of people seem to think “You were stupid, so just forget about it.” I still cling to the idea that there are honest people in the world, no matter how many times I’m forcibly disillusioned.
[quote=“Big Fluffy Matthew”]A wise person (Don’t know who, I don’t think it was me) once said “If you want to lose a friend, lend them money.”
Not helpful in this case I know, but still a lesson we can all learn.[/quote]
The same thing could be said about ex-boyfriends. I happened to have a friend give me a lead after he stopped responding to my e-mails about getting my money back only to have the little bastard flee as soon as he saw me. It would have been laughable if it weren’t for that costing me several thousand dollars.
The irony is the little shit had the nerves to e-mail me and ask if he could crash in my place when he returns to Taiwan. This after asking me if I could lend him $100 USD to help him go to school. I told him I would let him stay with me…when he gave me my f*cking money back. Guess who fell off the face of the earth again.
At least someone Taiwanese can be held accountable. Damn foreigners can go back to their home countries and vanish off the radar.