Taiwan needs to be included in fraud fight

A concerted restructuring of the global fraud-prevention landscape is under way as countries scramble to combat online fraud and transnational cybercrime. In September last year, China announced plans to establish an international alliance against telecom and online fraud, while in March, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and Interpol held the second Global Fraud Summit in Vienna. However, despite its sophisticated fraud-centered policies and tracking technologies, Taiwan has been virtually excluded from international collaborative efforts on cybercrime. If political barriers continue to prevent countries from cooperating on emerging threats and technologies, they risk pursuing a Maginot Line-style defense strategy that is unable to meet the demands of an evolving cybersecurity landscape.

Over the past few years, the UK and the US have sustained heavy losses from fraud. Losses in the US rose to US$15.9 billion last year from US$12.5 billion in 2024 and US$10 billion in 2023. In the UK, the media have dubbed London the “dirty money capital of the world,” citing its high rates of fraud and money laundering.

The British government launched the first Global Fraud Summit in London in March 2024; by the second summit in Vienna this year, more than 100 countries participated with about 40 ministers in attendance. The summit focused on scam centers in Southeast Asia. The Chinese Ministry of Public Security sent a delegation that included law-enforcement representatives from Hong Kong and Macau to participate in the summit while promoting its own initiative through side events.

The emergence, within a relatively short period, of the US, the UK and China as major actors seeking to establish multilateral mechanisms to prevent fraud demonstrates how such crime is exceeding any single jurisdiction’s capacity to tackle it on its own.

Taiwan has long been on the front lines in combating telecom and cybercrime, and has often been the first to identify new forms of investment fraud and deepfake techniques. Its technology and expertise are no less advanced than those of any major country attending these summits, yet Taiwan has consistently remained absent.

It is also not a part of the Global Public-Private Partnership Agreement on Fraud, a UK-led UN initiative that brings together more than a dozen countries and technology giants, including Meta, Google and Amazon. If international-intelligence sharing cannot include Taiwan, countries are effectively confronting an increasingly globalized form of crime while at an information disadvantage.

Fraud rings operating in China have targeted Taiwanese, while those in Taiwan have targeted Chinese. After the two sides signed an agreement on combating cross-border crime, the fraud operations promptly shifted to Southeast Asia. The Criminal Investigation Bureau stationed police liaisons overseas, as criminal networks expanded to eastern Europe, the Middle East and Southern Africa, while those parts of Southeast Asia where cracks in global governance are deepest remain at the epicenter of the crisis. Concentrating efforts on these cracks is what transnational fraud networks do best, and they show no mercy in the process.

If political reservations continue to result in Taiwan’s exclusion from efforts to tackle cybercrime, then any alliance on fraud — regardless of which country leads it — risks being built on incomplete coverage that could lead to the same kind of fatal bypass of the Maginot Line in 1940.

Samuel Lin is an assistant professor in Ming Chuan University’s Department of Criminal Justice.