A CH-47 Chinook helicopter carries a Taiwan flag during national day celebrations in Taipei, Taiwan, on Oct. 10, 2021. Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images
TAIPEI, Taiwan—Three people narrowly avoided being trafficked to China, where they allegedly would have had their organs forcibly removed, after being lured by fake online postings offering illegal work, prosecutors in the northern Taiwan city of Taoyuan said on Sept. 9.
The Taoyuan District Prosecutors’ Office indicted seven people accused of belonging to a human trafficking ring, seeking the maximum sentence of seven years for each defendant.
Prosecutors identified each defendant only by part of their name and said one of them, surnamed Chiang, was the suspected leader of the trafficking ring.
Chiang allegedly planned the trafficking operation last year, while one of his co-defendants was responsible for contacting organ buyers in China, according to prosecutors.
The group was promised 100,000 to 300,000 Tether tokens for each victim transported out of Taiwan for organ removal.
To find potential victims, three of the defendants allegedly posted on Facebook, Telegram, and other social media platforms, offering high pay to people willing to work as money mules or smugglers.
Those who fell for the scam would subsequently be held by the defendants at a residential building in Taoyuan, according to prosecutors.
Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau said at a press conference on Sept. 9 that Chiang had also visited a local fishing port, suggesting that the group may have planned to transport victims to China by fishing boat.
In a screenshot of the defendants’ Telegram communications, one of them wrote that people in China would be responsible for picking up the victims after they were sent there.
Prosecutors said three people fell for the scam, but none of them has been trafficked to China.
The seven defendants were indicted on several charges, including participation in a criminal organization under the Organized Crime Prevention Act, attempted human trafficking under the Criminal Code, and attempting to have others’ organs removed for profit through deception under the Human Trafficking Prevention Act.
The Epoch Times was unable to reach the defendants’ lawyers for comment.
In Taiwan, concerns about people being subjected to forced organ harvesting in Chinese hospitals drew renewed attention in June with the case of Chen Yao-li, a once well-known liver transplant doctor.
That month, Chen was
sentencedto two years in prison, suspended for five years, and had his medical license revoked. He was
indictedin 2024 for violating Taiwan’s Human Organ Transplant Act by illegally brokering patients to China for liver and kidney transplants.
Also in June, Taiwanese legislators
conveneda parliamentary hearing to examine the need for new legislation to strengthen the island’s legal framework against forced organ harvesting and combat transplant tourism linked to China.
Most victims of forced organ harvesting in China have been prisoners of conscience, according to
findingspublished by the China Tribunal—an independent, London-based people’s tribunal—in 2020.
“Killed to Order,” a New York Times bestseller by Jan Jekielek, senior editor at The Epoch Times,
examinesthe Chinese regime’s on-demand organ-harvesting industry, drawing on evidence from 20 years of independent investigations, and explores how it became an estimated $9 billion
industrythrough the targeting of prisoners of conscience.
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