How can so many people in Taiwan get tricked into ATM scams?

how can so many people in Taiwan get tricked into ATM scams?
I’m trying real hard to understand this issue… seem like it’s not
just the stupid ones who get tricked… a lot of the victims are
well-educated upper & upper-middle class folks…

just read a recent article in which the Taiwanese police estimated
that more than three billion(in NTD$) was lost by people who fell
victim to such scams last year… apparently it went up, despite
the efforts of the government to lower the daily ATM transfer limit…

thanks for any information!

What scams are you referring to?

because people here are far more gullible… i.e. its easier to let someone else do the thinking so that they can follow like sheep.

Lot’s of people get scammed by ATM scammers. They call up and tell people to move money from one account to another and people blindly do.
They also have little pocket machine readers that can read passwords and account numbers off cards, so if you lose your card be sure to report it as soon as possible - there are plenty of “wrong hands” lost cards can fall into here.

The police and the banks can easily sort out this problem. Banks know to which account the money was transferred to and the transaction can be traced to a real person. I can’t see why the police don’t do it.
Instead they introduce a 30,000NT transfer/withdrawal limit that left me stumped a couple of times.

I think they should also lock up the victims in a padded cell for being so gulible.

While it is true that the scammers search out the gullible, it is also true that they are surprisingly sophisticated and persuasive in practice. It sounds dumb when you hear someone has been scammed, but real ‘confidence men’ specialize in creating and exploiting trust and some are very, very good at it.

It may surprise everyone to know this, but ATM scams happen in places other than Taiwan.

Of course they do - it’s just that the scammers are able to get away with it here.

? They get busted all the time. There was a crew of them in the Chinese papers this morning.

I’ve been offered a chance to get 2% commission on a transfer from one of Charle’s Taylor’s former general’s relatives. I just need to transfer $5000 into an account first.

Think I should do it? I plan on consulting a fortune teller on the matter.

Then it’s about time.

[quote=“creamypanda”]how can so many people in Taiwan get tricked into ATM scams?
I’m trying real hard to understand this issue… seem like it’s not
just the stupid ones who get tricked… a lot of the victims are
well-educated upper & upper-middle class folks…

thanks for any information![/quote]
Your bank has prepared a secret report that answers your question.
PM me and I will send you the codes to enter into your ATM to access this report…

My wife is a smart, well educated woman, but she was suckered by those bastards. She received a call from someone who addressed her in a familiar way and whose voice sounded just like one of her friends. The supposed friend told her that she needed money urgently, and my wife promptly sent her the NT$100,000 requested. As soon as she mentioned it to me, I smelt the rat that my wife hadn’t caught any whiff of, and told her to quickly call her friend and check that it really had been her. Needless to say, it wasn’t, so I had the wife immediately call the MOI phone-fraud-reporting hotline that I’d read about in the papers. They told us that we’d best go and report it at the local police station, which we hurried off to do, though not expecting for a moment that we’d ever get a cent of the money back. The police were very sympathetic and helpful, and several of them worked busily on their computers for a couple of hours tracing the telephone number and bank account, and so on. We were greatly surprised and highly impressed when, several months later, an official letter arrived informing my wife that NT$90,000 of her money had been tracked to a bank account in Kaohsiung and was available to be remitted back to her. Very good work indeed by the local boys in blue!

I’m pretty sure she’s learned her lesson (her family’s teasing was more painful to her than the thought of having lost that hard-earned money) and will never fall for anything like that again.

I’m not sure it’s more prevalent here than elsewhere; perhaps it is, but I’m not everywhere so I have no way of knowing that. Call me skeptical. Speaking of which, the school systems here don’t seem to teach students to think for themselves. Thinking for yourself is an important ingredient in healthy skepticism, which itself is needed to avoid being suckered. So it’s at least plausible that an education system which teaches only rote memorization plays a role in this. :idunno:

A combination of childishness, greed, and a desire for an instant fix to financial problems. Probably the same elsewhere, maybe just differring by degree.

A combination of childishness, greed, and a desire for an instant fix to financial problems. Probably the same elsewhere, maybe just differring by degree.[/quote]

If you read Omniloquacious’ post above; that’s not always the case. Alot of the scams work on fear as in his wifes case.

I once recieved a phone call from a very frantic woman and could only make out something about a motorcycle accident. She even replied with a little English when I spoke to her in English.
I immediately assumed it was a foreign friends wife and her husband had been in an accident. She really had me going, although I wouldn’t just rush down to the ATM and wire her cash without thinking about it.
I gave the phone to my wife and she quickly realized it was nobody we knew and hung up.
Apparently our numbers are on a list and we get these calls all the time. Some are from the courthouse, telephone company, supposed friends etc…
Now we just have fun with them and act concerned, then start asking where they are and say we’ll come. Usually they hang up after realizing we are playing them but sometimes they say “fuck you!”.
I think Taiwanese can be very generous in emergency situations and this is what scammers are taking advantage of part of the time.

That might be true but anyone with a bit of common sense should question the whole situation and know who the caller is, i.e. if he really is a friend or relative.

A combination of childishness, greed, and a desire for an instant fix to financial problems. Probably the same elsewhere, maybe just differring by degree.[/quote]

Add to that the indelibly ingrained fear of/subservience to perceived authority.
Mrs. the chief gets at least one call a week telling her to get down to the 7-11 pronto and rescue her life savings.
Anyone who says they’re crafty and well-thought out is talking out their ass.
These shmoes consistently call after 6 pm, and always call my wife’s cell first, neither of which seems even remotely consistent with conventional bank practice.
Plus the fact that none of them is ever able to include anything remotely compelling in their pitch to convince the would-be victim that they are anything other than a boiler room scamster.
I would imagine that the hit ratio, even given the staggering amount quoted in the OP, is still pretty low.
Two points to consider:
First, despite never falling for it for a second, my wife has, nonetheless, never followed my advice to tell them to go fuck themselves, citing the fact that they do have her number, and to do so would doubtless invite endless abuse and retribution.
Second, and this is kind of a telling comment on a much more widespread problem, she has likewise never agreed to report the calls to the cops, saying that they won’t be able to do anyhting about it.
MY contention that if more people reported it, the cops might be able to, falls on deaf ears.

I have been called a few times.

Once, it was one pretending to be my daughter, telling me that she got herself into a traffic accident. (My daughter just turned 9, so no way that could happen).

Then she claimed that she was my wife. We are divorced, and she never even once talked to me in that sobbing begging voice - not her style.

I reminded “the wife” about those facts.

They hung up.

Another time it was some scammers trying to get me to pay a phone bill (note that I get a lot of those calls). I talked in Enbglish, they told in Chinese that my English was too poor. I exploded and called the guy a lot of nasty things, after which I hung up.

No, they are not very savvy.

Sort of reminds me of those Nigerian e-mail scammers. I was truly amazed to see the sorts of people hooked by those obvious rip offs, they included investment managers and lawyers, etc.

HG

My brother-in-law got a call from a woman crying saying “daddy I was beaten up by gangsters. I owe them $900,000 but they’ll accept $50,000 if you send it right now”. The poor guy was distraught. It sounded real to him, since his daughter has a tendancy to get into this sort of trouble (the money kind, not the gangsters beating her up kind). When his wife called my wife to whine about it I told her to tell him its a scam (for one thing, nobody would accept 50,000 in place of 900,000). He was too much in a panic to listen at that point, and ran down the bank. The person at the bank told him to calm down and call his daughter right away. She was fine, of course.

According to the people at the bank, the accounts many of these people use are made using real ID numbers, real names, fake addresses. Rarely any way to track the perpetrators, only the money. I personally would think they could at least get photos of the people when they use an ATM, but I guess not all of them have cameras.

I’ve gotten the call from time to time where a crying girl says “daddy… help me”. I usually just reply with one of my dog’s names. “Kuri? Kuri is that you?”