Why Are 009 Scam Calls Still Going Strong?

Four years ago, Vedfolnir published an article titled “Is 009 a Scam Call or a Chunghwa Telecom Overdue Notice?”. Since then, I rarely had the chance to answer a landline—until another one came in this afternoon. That was when I realized scam calls were never actually blocked by the government; they simply never stopped.

No wonder fraud cases on the island of Taiwan have been climbing year after year in recent times. It was even shocking to learn recently that legislators and even cabinet-level officials of the ruling party were found to have close ties with fraud rings. As for how this political storm will unfold, let’s keep watching.

But let’s get back to today’s call starting with 009. In the past, I would at least exchange a few words with the fraud ring; this time, I could not even make out the other party’s voice before the call was abruptly hung up—well, well, you folks have truly mastered the “Reject and Disconnect” technique.

Clearly, the fraud ring’s standard operating procedure (SOP) has also evolved. Now, the moment the call connects, they deliberately wait for static to appear on the line, prompting us to naturally say a few more “hellos.” This buys the fraud ring time to judge whether the person on the other end is an easy target.

After being hung up on, I checked the call log on my phone and found that within a short memory window, three numbers disguised with the 009 international prefix had appeared, as shown below. This does not even count calls with no caller ID, or other unfamiliar numbers that at least look normal.

• 0093236450543
• 009384621031
• 009886977718732

I asked my family whether they had been receiving a lot of scam calls lately, and the answer was a definite yes.

This makes one wonder: Chunghwa Telecom’s engineers clearly know how these disguised numbers are generated, yet as intermediaries, why are they still unable to block them?

If it is merely a lack of legal grounds, the ruling party established a cross-ministerial anti-fraud task force in ROC year 105 (2016), an anti-fraud national team in year 111 (2022), and an anti-fraud dedicated office this year, year 112 (2023). I believe that as long as Chunghwa Telecom’s senior management is willing to negotiate, there should be opportunities.

Otherwise, the people pay a pile of taxes and are asked to fund a bunch of anti-fraud national team office staff—are we doing this for nothing? (Yes, I am deliberately poking fun at them.)