600 ARRESTED IN ASIA-WIDE CRIME BUST

MASS ARRESTS ACROSS ASIA
OVER PHONE SCAM NETWORK

Taipei, Taiwan (AP) - Nearly 600 people, mostly Taiwanese and Chinese, were rounded up across Asia for suspected massive online fraud in a rare example of regional police coordination, officials said Friday.  Taiwanese police said 598 suspects, including 410 Taiwanese and 181 Chinese nationals, were nabbed in a carefully planned operation involving law enforcers from half a dozen countries.  They were detained in Taiwan, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand on Thursday for allegedly running Internet and telephone scams mainly targeting mainland Chinese, said Taiwan’s authorities.  Details of the scams are sketchy and appeared to have varied from country to country, but police believe thousands of people were taken in.   In Taiwan alone, more than 800 policemen were mobilized to arrest suspected local swindlers, with Tw$1.33 million ($458,000) in cash confiscated.

The two main tricks are to surprise the victim, for instance by telling them they have won the lottery, or to frighten them by saying their bank account or credit card was suspended.  The group in Malaysia called individuals in China.  They told them they had been issued a traffic summons and asked them to pay money into an online account to settle the fine or face court action.   Taiwanese fraud rings have recently relocated to Southeast Asia after the island’s police joined forces with Chinese authorities to bust their operations.  Jakarta police said Chinese and Taiwanese had been arrested in the Indonesian capital.  Suspects would rent houses with broadband access and make phone calls over the Internet to many victims in China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam in which they posed as an official to extort money.

Swindling rings busted around Asia had duped tens of thousands of mostly Chinese and Taiwanese victims through a variety of money scams, Taiwanese police said Friday after 598 suspects were arrested.  Vaishnava philosophers have discovered that all the mistakes we are guilty of making originate from four defects.  All people are subject to fall victim to these defects, and one of them is an inclination to deceive others. 

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US?  

The conditioned soul has four defects: (1) bhrama (‘the tendency to error’), (2) pramada (‘inattention’), (3) karanapatava (‘the inadequacy of the senses’) and (4) vipralipsa (‘the desire to deceive’).  Any conditioned soul has these defects.  Bhrama means the tendency to think something that is true to be false and vice versa.  ... The word Pramada means ‘inattention.’ Even when the senses do their job, the mind is not entirely attentive and so makes further errors.  Karanapatava means the incapacity of the senses to properly perceive anything.  And the last fault is quite devastating; it is Vipralipsa, ‘the desire to deceive.’  ... Even the greatest scholars cannot free themselves of these defects when it comes to assessing transcedence.  In these matters, the words of the Veda, which are not the product of human beings, are the only source of sure knowledge.

Śrīla Bhakti Promode Puri Mahārāja :
“Śrī Guru Pranali - Siddha Pranali”
A conversation with a sannyasa disciple,
Durga Puja, Sept. 28, 1998, Gopinatha Gaudiya Matha,
Cakra Tirtha, Jagannatha Puri.
Bhaktivedanta Memorial Library - http://bvml.org/SBPPG/sgp-sp.html