Taiwan police arrested eight people suspected of involvement in telecom fraud that cost a professor at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University around 18 million yuan ($2.6million), Beijing Youth Daily reported Saturday.
According to a notice issued on the official website of Qingshui district police Thursday, seven men and one woman were arrested in the city of Taichung during a joint Taiwan-mainland crackdown on Wednesday.
The professor, surnamed Huang, was fooled by a fraudster pretending to be a judicial official on July 23 , 2016 and was reportedly scammed out of some 18 million yuan.
"The suspect told the victim that she was involved in a fraud case and that her assets needed to be handed over for management," Qingshui police officer Li Guoxing told the media.
Mainland police held a joint crackdown with their Taiwan counterparts after finding that some of Huang's cash was withdrawn from a Taiwan ATM and some was transferred online by devices using IPs registered in the region.
The suspects were found with seven computers, 22 smart phones and 2,544 documents related to voice call systems in an apartment in downtown Taichung.
The suspects were not directly involved in Huang's case but offered assistance to the scammers such as providing the voice call system they used, citizens' private information and online transfer platforms.
The eight will be charged with fraud by a Taichung court.
Taiwan police will continue the investigation.
Chinese police solved 83,000 cases of telecom and Internet fraud in 2016, up 49.6 percent year on year, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
