TAIPEI (TVBS News) — Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB, 刑事局), the island's premier law enforcement agency for major crimes, has suspended 73,000 suspicious LINE accounts in a sweeping crackdown on digital fraud, officials announced Thursday (June 26). The massive purge represents an unprecedented partnership between Taiwanese authorities and LINE Corporation, the messaging platform widely used across East Asia, in an effort to disrupt the sophisticated tools employed by international scam syndicates targeting vulnerable users.
Lin Chien-lung (林建隆), chief of the High-Tech Crime Center (科技犯罪防制中心), a specialized division within Taiwan's law enforcement system, detailed the sophisticated methods employed by these criminal networks. According to Lin, fraudsters initially recruit targets through mainstream social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube before funneling them into private LINE investment groups. These criminals meticulously craft personas as financial experts or investment assistants, convincing victims to transfer funds while employing automated systems to maintain the illusion of personalized communication and professional financial management.
Investigators have been monitoring these fraudulent operations since February, when a specialized police task force began infiltrating the investment groups to document how scammers establish credibility by sharing seemingly professional stock analyses interspersed with casual lifestyle photos. The CIB's technical team subsequently analyzed thousands of suspicious LINE accounts, revealing a pattern where fraudsters rapidly create and discard digital identities to evade detection. This methodical investigation has yielded a database of 45,000 high-risk phone numbers associated with the fraud networks, providing authorities with valuable intelligence for ongoing enforcement actions.
The current enforcement action represents an unprecedented systematic purge of fraudulent messaging accounts in Taiwan's digital landscape, officials noted. The operation will continue through July 7, allowing authorities to further identify and disrupt criminal networks operating on the platform. Law enforcement officials have issued public warnings urging citizens to exercise extreme caution, specifically advising against joining replacement investment groups that may suddenly appear after existing groups dissolve or experience unexplained membership departures — a common pattern when scammers attempt to regroup after detection.
