But Manila cops had arrested 357 foreigners in simultaneous raids in Quezon City, Marikina City, and Cainta and Antipolo City in Rizal province on Thursday.
According to Director Samuel Pagdilao Jr., CIDG chief, the raid was the “biggest and most resolute operation carried out by law enforcement units in the history of anticyber crime drive [in the Philippines],”.
And due to the huge number of people arrested in just one instance, the nabbed suspects were housed in the police training school’s gym instead of the usual detention utilities.
For one, I have never heard in prior instance where cops had made such large number of arrest on one occasion, for the same crime, and of foreigners at that. This should be one for the books.
The 357 arrested persons were mostly of Chinese and Taiwanese citizenship taken in committing online frauds and scam, violating the Access Devices Regulation Act of 1998.
We’ve heard about Nigerian syndicates and this group conducts their modus operandi in the same vein, using online channels to defraud their victims. The syndicate accordingly makes 20M a day, and this should be way much too much.
The group’s modus operandi involves threat of their victims that their bank accounts have been put under investigation for money laundering and terrorists’ activities and that they should be put in one account for safekeeping. Under threat of hazard, their unsuspecting victims would oblige to their demands only to find out that this group are impostors and fakes.
Most of the victims would be of Chinese descent since the group often represent themselves as members of police, prosecutor’s office, courts, insurance companies, banks and other financial institutions.
According to the CIDG’s deputy director for operations, Senior Supt. Keith Singian, the group’s modus operandi “is a classic example of the operations of criminal syndicate in China, only this time, the suspects who are foreigners have used the Philippines as base of operations.”
Well, their modus is as easily determined as bogus by just looking at it yetr many felt victims to their machinations. Naivety often leads to misfortune. Tsk,tsk.
4 Comments
I saw this in the news last night and I hope this is the end of the syndicate and their fraudulent schemes.
ReplyDeleteI salute the law enforcers for arresting hundreds of lawbreakers.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this news. Keep it up!!!
maybe they were with the asian mafia.
ReplyDelete@Franc : I was so surprised at the huge number of their members and the amount of activity they've put into their modus.
ReplyDelete@Richard : Yes. It was really a feather on their caps.
@ fifileigh : That's most probably be the case and it would not far if they've got members still out there.