Reunion with ex-classmate ‘Scorpion Lady’ nearly turns into organ harvesting ordeal for Taiwan man

School reunions can be awkward, sometimes unpleasant, affairs for many people.

For a Taiwanese man recently, his recent reunion with an old school friend was way worse – he survived an attempt by his primary school classmate to harvest his organs.

A woman surnamed Hsieh, 29, now known as the “Scorpion Lady” in Taiwanese media and part of a group of scammers, attempted to invite the man to work in Cambodia. She also detained him against his will, and after finding no more use for him, attempted to sell his organs online before she was foiled by undercover police patrolling the Internet.

Local police in Taoyuan, a county in capital Taipei where the group operated, charged the woman, identified only as Hsieh, and four other accomplices with human trafficking, robbery and organised crime last Wednesday, Taiwanese media reported.

Hsieh had met her former classmate at Taoyuan on Nov 4, 2022 under the pretence of offering him a job opportunity, said local police referring to the man by a pseudonym, Ah Wei. After Ah Wei got drunk on rice wine, Hsieh handed him to a scam group she was acquainted with for a NT$10,000 (S$435) reward.

The group, known for their human smuggling operations, then held him at a motel and took him to different banks in Hsinchu and New Taipei City to open savings accounts under Ah Wei’s name. But they failed to do so as his state of drunkenness was apparent and raised the suspicions of bank employees.

Undeterred, Hsieh and her accomplices put up Ah Wei’s organs for sale through an agent known as a “car dismantler”, code for organ harvesters, and also placed ads on Telegram groups seeking buyers looking for “fast deals”.

Their scheme was foiled by undercover police posing as organ-buying middlemen who agreed a deal for NT$2 million before setting up a meeting at a parking lot where five people, including Hsieh, were arrested. Four other accomplices were later nabbed in relation to the same case, Taiwanese media reported.

Investigators tracked down the group of “snakeheads”, as Chinese human smugglers are called, in five different locations through data from car dealerships and surveillance cameras, prosecutors in Taoyuan said.

Public prosecutors charged the group with attempted human trafficking, by the deprivation of freedom of movement, coercion, and deceit as well as attempted harvesting of human organs, proposing that the court impose a heavy sentence.

Taiwanese gangs have been reported to be in cahoots with Cambodian criminal organisations, luring people to the South-east Asian nation to participate in scams or other illicit activity under coercion.

In March 2023, a Taiwan court found three people guilty of deceiving people holding Taiwanese passports to head to Cambodia to work as “cyber slaves”, sentencing them to prison terms between 42 and 90 months.