(Add details) Taipei, June 18 (CNA) The National Immigration Agency (NIA) announced Thursday that it has smashed a large-scale human trafficking ring involving suspects from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and the United States. The cross-border human smuggling gang is the largest ever uncovered in Taiwan in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a spokesman for the NIA's Border Affairs Corps told a news conference.
Seventy-four Taiwanese suspects of the ring were turned over to the Taoyuan Prosecutors Office for further investigation, the spokesman said.
According to the initial investigation, a Chinese man surnamed Wang was the mastermind of the ring, which helped Chinese women obtain passports of the Republic of China altered with their photos.
The fake passports were then used to apply for valid U.S. visas so that the women could enter the United States using the forged passports.
A Taiwanese accomplice surnamed Yang was allegedly responsible for swindling local young girls' ID documents from their parents, mainly in eastern Taiwan's Hualien County. And a tour agency manager identified as Liao used the documents to apply for ROC passports and for U.S. visas, which were later doctored with photos of young Chinese women.
NIA officials said Liao was able to obtain genuine ROC passports and valid U.S. visas for Chinese women seeking to smuggle into the United States, as the Taipei office of the American Institute in Taiwan does not require Taiwanese applicants younger than 14 years old to undergo an interview.
After Liao got the passports, someone else would take them to Hong Kong, where Taiwanese women hired by the gang would accompany these Chinese women to travel to the United States by serving as a pseudo companion.
More than 30 Taiwanese women, some of whom were college lecturers, former flight attendants and nurses, were employed to accompany the Chinese women, and were paid US$1,000 to US$1,500 in reward for each trip. Some of these Taiwanese women claimed to have no knowledge about the scheme.
Citing information provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the corps said under the fraudulent scheme, more than 40 Chinese women have successfully entered the United States using the forged ROC passports.
Each of these Chinese women paid US$60,000 to US$70,000 to be smuggled to the United States, and the U.S. authorities strongly suspect that they might be illegally engaged in prostitution in the country, the corps said.
Meanwhile, Hualien County police authorities said they have launched an in-depth investigation into the case, because they suspect that personal data of young girls at some local aboriginal villages were illegally sold to criminal elements.
The indigenous girls' families said they were fooled into thinking the people who took their daughter's documents would help their family apply for government subsidies.
(By Flor Wang)