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By Yao Yue-hung and Jason Pan / Staff reporters
Many online shopping sites put customers at risk of fraud, with thousands of people being targeted in telephone scams after buying online, Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) officials said on Monday.
Bureau data showed that 2,725 fraud cases were reported in the second quarter of this year related to Taiwan’s leading online bookseller, books.com.tw, while 477 fraud reports were filed related to the Taiwanese Web site of French sporting goods retailer Decathlon Group.
CIB officials have demanded that these e-commerce sites improve security to protect their customers’ personal information, and said the bureau is investigating the fraud cases.
Customers of Eslite’s online bookstore reported 252 incidents of fraud during the same period, while 163 cases were filed by users of shopping.friday.tw and 119 for the Singaporean e-commerce site Shopee.
“Almost all of the cases involved customers receiving telephone calls from people claiming to be customer service staff from the businesses,” the CIB said. “The various scams work by getting people to ‘resend’ a payment, or make a new transaction.”
The scammer usually says that a transaction error had occurred, there was a mistake in setting up an installment…
