Homecoming Con Air

Taking off at a Philippine domestic airport


Taiwan has been the export powerhouse of fraudsters to the Mainland China and Southeast Asia, namely Malaysia, Thailand...




A conscience is what hurts when everything else feels great

The news of some Taiwanese former political big guns and a bunch of fraud ring members are detained after being repatriated from China is not uncommon, but never get it this big before.

On September 14, the Philippines deported 385 people, 318 are Taiwanese, while the others are Chinese, arrested in the country's biggest crackdown on online fraud. They were accused of impersonating police, prosecutors and bank officials to convince victims in China and Taiwan to transfer money into accounts provided by the syndicate.

The proliferation of Taiwanese fraud ring members had become so big a disturbance of Philippine society that Manila considered holding the 279 Taiwanese to face charges brought by local courts.

Taiwan's economic problems, in part caused by the structural mismatch between education and business needs, result in a failure to provide adequate jobs for these graduates. Also lax punishment of fraud, among other reasons, as contributing to the popularity of fraud among local criminals.

It requires a conscious moral choice to break laws, and more importantly, to harm others for one's own benefit. The fact that a nation as small as Taiwan has the chance to claim the fraudster kingdom title shows that an unproportionally large number of people are willing to cheat others for a living.

However, this tiny island with such low moral standard, it merely just the tip of an iceberg.