When People with Intellectual Disabilities Encounter Dummy-Account Fraud Cases: An Interview with PAPID Taiwan

"Dummy-account cases involving people with intellectual disabilities are not particularly difficult"-this is a comment we often hear from legal practitioners. Indeed, if the central difficulty in dummy-account cases is proving subjective criminal intent, then, "logically," when a person's cognitive impairment has already been recognized under the state disability system, determining whether that person lacked the necessary awareness or intent should not be so difficult in practice.

Yet when we came across the criminal judgment in the Taichung District Court Li O-Ching case (Case No. 108-Jian-Shang-43) and the prosecutor's grounds of appeal in the Tainan District Court Yang O-Wen case (Case No. 107-Jin-Su-27), we realized that cases involving people with intellectual disabilities cannot simply be set aside when discussing dummy-account prosecutions.

Background

Taichung District Court Li O-Ching Case: Mild Intellectual Disability Certificate, Expert Evaluation, Final Conviction

The facts of Li O-Ching's case were not materially different from those of an ordinary dummy-account case. According to the prosecutor's application for summary judgment, on April 27, 2018, Li sent his Taiwan Cooperative Bank passbook and ATM card by convenience-store delivery to a member of a fraud ring, then sent the password through LINE, thereby providing the account information for use by the fraud ring.

The court of first instance found him guilty of aiding fraud and sentenced him to 55 days of short-term imprisonment, commutable to a fine at NT$1,000 per day. The summary judgment shows that the investigation file already contained documentation of his mild intellectual disability. Yet the court did not treat that information as bearing on whether he had the intent to assist the fraud ring or whether Article 19 of the Criminal Code applied; it considered the disability only in sentencing:

"Although he understood that his conduct was unlawful (see reverse of p. 60 of the investigation file), he holds a certificate of mild intellectual disability (see p. 65 of the investigation file) and completed only junior high school (see p. 9 of the investigation file), indicating comparatively limited intellectual and educational capacity. Considering also that his conduct contributed to criminal activity and had a nontrivial impact on public order, and all other circumstances, the sentence stated in the disposition is imposed, together with the prescribed conversion rate for a commutable fine."

The second-instance judgment-Case No. 108-Jian-Shang-43-is what first caught our attention. On appeal, Li finally had assistance from a legal-aid attorney. Defense counsel requested a professional evaluation of whether Article 19 of the Criminal Code applied to Li at the time of the offense, producing the following findings:

The defendant is a 33-year-old unmarried man who graduated from a junior high school resource class. He performed poorly in school from childhood and, at a teacher's recommendation, was evaluated and found to have a mild intellectual disability, for which he holds a disability certificate. He did not continue his education after junior high school. His mother stated that he had few friends and, because of kidney and heart conditions, spent most of his time at home using his smartphone and the internet.

The defendant's EEG was normal. On the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, his Full Scale IQ was 43, with scores of 50 in verbal comprehension, 51 in perceptual reasoning, 50 in working memory, and 50 in processing speed. Although these subtest results fell within the "moderately deficient" range relative to age norms,

the court reasoned that "the defendant was markedly defensive during testing and had low motivation, and the results were inconsistent with Li's functioning in daily life (for example, he can use smartphone messaging applications and can independently bring important identification documents to a bank to handle his personal account)." It therefore concluded that the evaluation may have underestimated his abilities and held that Article 19 of the Criminal Code did not apply.

We understand that Article 19 of the Criminal Code is applied narrowly in practice. Beyond Article 19, defense counsel will often argue at the level of intent that, given a defendant's limited cognitive capacity, the defendant lacked the subjective intent to aid fraud. Yet even after this case reached the second instance-with defense counsel and an expert evaluation-the conviction became final. That outcome drew our attention.

Tainan District Court Yang O-Wen Case: Trial Judge Identifies Concerns and Orders an Evaluation; Prosecutor Appeals

The indictment in the Yang O-Wen case was entirely ordinary-the sort of template allegation commonly seen in aiding-money-laundering cases:

Yang O-Wen should have been aware that unlawful individuals in contemporary society frequently utilize dummy accounts to deposit and withdraw funds, thereby engaging in fraudulent criminal activities. She could foresee that casually providing her personal accounts for others to withdraw funds of unknown origin carried the risk of enabling perpetrators of unlawful fraud to successfully obtain property from victims and consummate their fraudulent criminal intent. With conditional intent to commit fraud and money laundering-accepting the result even if it occurred-she delivered her passbook, seal, ATM card, and password issued by the First Commercial Bank Co., Ltd. at some time on June 1, 2017, in front of the First Bank Dawan Branch located at No. 0, Section 0, 0 Road, 0 District, Tainan City, to a member of a fraud syndicate with unknown true name and household registration who called himself "A-Wei," and further provided her account issued by the King's Town Bank for that member and his affiliated fraud syndicate to utilize in committing crimes

After the case reached the first-instance court, however, the judgment shows that the judge noticed that something about the defendant seemed unusual. The judge therefore appointed defense counsel on the court's own initiative and asked Chianan Psychiatric Center to evaluate the defendant's intellectual functioning, including whether she was particularly susceptible to deception or inclined to trust others. The evaluation found a mild intellectual disability:

Yang was conscious and had previously experienced distress such as emotional issues, sleep disturbances, hallucinations, and delusions, but without a definitive psychiatric diagnosis. However, according to the results of psychological assessment, her intelligence falls under mild intellectual disability, and her thinking patterns and responses are relatively simplified and perseverative. Her reality testing and discernment of right and wrong in behavior are relatively deficient, particularly her performance IQ falling within the range of moderate intellectual disability, leading to the inference that her financial management capacity is limited to a certain degree. Furthermore, Yang's work experience was mostly brief, and according to her description, mostly consisted of jobs paid in cash. She was unfamiliar with processes such as opening accounts, remitting funds, and withdrawing cash, and her comprehension of complex social contexts was affected by intellectual disability and limited social experience. However, upon explanation by the evaluator, Yang could understand the course of the case, the reasons for involvement in the fraud, and future preventive methods.

Taken as a whole, Yang's financial judgment at the time of the alleged offense was below the average level of an ordinary person, and her involvement in the case was related to her intellectual disability and limited social experience.

The first-instance court therefore found that members of the fraud ring had taken advantage of Yang O-Wen's comparatively limited reality judgment and ability to distinguish right from wrong, as well as her unfamiliarity with opening accounts, transferring funds, and withdrawing cash. They obtained her account information through deception and used deceptive instructions to induce her to make withdrawals at banks and other locations. The court held that Yang herself had no shared intent with the fraud-ring members to launder money or obtain property by fraud and acquitted her.

The prosecutor nevertheless appealed. According to the grounds quoted in the judgment, the prosecutor argued that Yang O-Wen was not wholly without social or work experience; that she admitted having experience with transfers and remittances; and that she had traveled to Taichung to withdraw cash and hand it to members of the fraud ring. The prosecutor argued that these facts were sufficient to establish an intent to conceal criminal proceeds.

Fortunately, the second-instance court ultimately found the prosecutor's appeal meritless and dismissed it, making the acquittal final. The case caught our attention because the trial judge proactively recognized a problem, appointed counsel, and ordered an evaluation, while the prosecutor still assessed the defendant's cognitive capacity by reference to the knowledge and experience of an ordinary person.

Visiting PAPID Taiwan and Observing a Self-Advocacy Empowerment Meeting

After seeing these cases, we decided not to look away, but to examine more closely the difficulties people with intellectual disabilities may face in dummy-account cases. We therefore interviewed professionals who have worked in the field for many years. Through the perspectives of the Deputy Secretary-General of the Parents Association for Persons with Intellectual Disability, Taiwan (PAPID Taiwan), two frontline social workers, and an attorney who had handled a dummy-account case involving a person with an intellectual disability, we tried to enter this world of cognitive differences.

Just before the Lunar New Year, we visited PAPID Taiwan and interviewed Deputy Secretary-General Sun I-Hsin, social worker Yang Sung-Chin, Chen Szu-Yao, supervisor at the Da'an-Wenshan Disability Resource Center, and Wu Huai-Nan, director of the Neihu-Songshan Disability Resource Center.

Li O-Chi Case: Moderate Intellectual Disability Certificate, Social-Worker Testimony, Final Acquittal

The attorneys and social workers shared with us a case in which they had both provided assistance: the Li O-Chi case (Taiwan High Court Criminal Judgment, Case No. 110-Shang-Yi-1366).

Li O-Chi, who has a moderate intellectual disability, was laid off from his previous job. Being a hardworking person, he was anxious to find his next job. At this time, he saw the following message on Facebook: "Increase passive income; those seeking employment may apply." Li O-Chi consequently added Ms. Chang's LINE account. Ms. Chang stated that she worked in an accounting firm and needed bank accounts to provide corporate tax incentives, offering NT$30,000 per month for lending an account, with NT$10,000 advanced every 10 days. Li O-Chi believed it to be true and sent photographs of his ID card, bank account passbook, and ATM card to Ms. Chang. In return, he never received the promised "account-lending fee" from beginning to end, and was further notified by the bank that there was a problem with his account. Only then did Li O-Chi suddenly realize he had been deceived.

Supervisor Chen and Director Wu of the disability center shared with us that individuals with mild intellectual disabilities often do not differ in their work situations from ordinary people; when major events do not occur, many times their cases are not opened at disability resource centers. This case entered case management precisely because he encountered major events such as a traffic accident and layoff, giving the social workers the opportunity-through spending a long time establishing a relationship and working together with him-to provide behavioral observations during the court trial.

In Li O-Chi's case, the fraud ring used the account he provided as a dummy account to defraud other victims, and prosecutors charged him with aiding fraud. At the first instance, he repeatedly maintained, "I believed I could earn money by renting out my account; I believed this kind of job existed." The judge did not accept that explanation:

Given that the defendant has prior work experience in jobs such as environmental protection bureau cleaning and dishwashing, and is aware of the correlation between exerting labor and corresponding remuneration, looking at how the person who acquired the account in this case introduced the job content to the defendant via LINE chats: one account yields NT$30,000 per month, paid in 3 installments per month, NT$10,000 per installment, 1 installment every 10 days (see page 180 of the court file), meaning that merely providing 1 account allows one to collect NT$30,000 monthly. This is evidently vastly different from the defendant's past work experience where he had to sweep streets and wash dishes to earn wages. Taking into account that the defendant stated he was unclear about the job content applied for by delivering the account in this case, that he possessed experience using accounts and ATM cards, and that he handed over the ATM card and password to others for use only after confirming that the account in this case contained no substantial amount of his own money, it can be believed that his intellectual disability does not impede his basic social living capacity and his ability to foresee that delivering the account in this case would be used for fraud. Therefore, the defendant should have been able to discern that a job yielding a monthly income of NT$30,000 simply by providing the account in this case was not a legitimate job, and carried an extremely high probability of causing the account in this case to be used for crime

It was not until the second instance that the judge noticed that Li's replies in the LINE conversations were consistently brief. His legal-aid attorney also called his social worker to testify in detail about how he ordinarily communicates: although Li frequently uses LINE, messages containing long passages of text can be difficult for him to understand, and his own replies are usually very short. By contrast, the fraud ring's messages consisted of long blocks of text that were not easy to comprehend. Taken together, this information led the appellate court to conclude that it could not find that, when Li provided the account, he foresaw that it might be used to defraud others. The conviction was therefore reversed and he was acquitted.

Compared with the two earlier cases, this case-because a legal-aid attorney became involved and, unusually, a social worker testified-gave the court concrete evidence that a person with an intellectual disability may be able to use a smartphone, reply on LINE, and gain social experience through cleaning or dishwashing work without necessarily understanding the consequences of handing over a bank account. This shifted the focus of the proceedings and made us more curious: Which things do we stereotypically assume people with intellectual disabilities can or cannot do? What does a smartphone mean to this community? What clues can be found in LINE conversations?

"That's What You Consider Fluent Conversation"

One day, we attended a self-advocacy empowerment meeting for people with intellectual disabilities organized by PAPID Taiwan. The meeting is held about six times a year and, since the pandemic, has used a hybrid in-person and online format. Local organizations serving people with intellectual disabilities from around Taiwan send participants; both caregivers and people with intellectual disabilities attend. In the afternoon, the two groups meet separately. The session for people with intellectual disabilities is chaired and discussed entirely by participants themselves, who also present their views, while staff provide support from the sidelines.

At this meeting, participants happened to be discussing their annual plan and division of responsibilities. They broke into groups to discuss topics of interest, presented their ideas, voted on the topics that attracted the most interest, and then freely chose which topics they wanted to share. Some participants could present only a single word, such as "travel," but most could explain the topics shown on their posters-for example: "Don't use your phone while walking, or you may fall; be careful"; "Don't litter"; "The top-voted topics in our group are health care and music"; and "We want to discuss how not to spend too much money on game points."

The topics ultimately selected included "idols," "singing," and "travel." At first glance, the results may not reveal the influence of the digital age. But when discussing "idols," one participant asked, "Does it have to be an entertainer? Can an internet influencer count?" When discussing "traffic safety," participants explained that they meant not using a smartphone while walking or while riding a metro escalator. And when discussing how not to spend too much money, they meant not spending too much on game points. These examples offered a glimpse into how participants use the internet.

We asked social worker Yang Sung-Chin, who had worked in the field for about six years, whether people in this community relied more heavily on the internet and smartphones because they had fewer social options. (Given that we ourselves are internet addicts, we knew this was an amateur question.) Yang said the phenomenon seemed to have become more visible after inexpensive OPPO smartphones entered the market. In his experience, many people spend a great deal of time online, and young people with intellectual disabilities can be very capable smartphone users. Some clients had told him about livestreaming themselves singing to friends and enjoying editing videos on their phones-activities that are not particularly difficult for people with mild intellectual disabilities. In the digital age, treating a young person with an intellectual disability unfavorably merely because they can use information technology "normally" may ignore the contemporary life context of this community. Yang also noted, however, that some people with intellectual disabilities may have more difficulty generalizing from one example to another: once one group member mentions something involving a phone, others may follow that train of thought, which can lead many discussion topics back to smartphones.

We then asked another decidedly amateur question: Can you determine the degree of a person's intellectual disability by whether they appear to converse fluently?

The social worker answered firmly: "That's what you consider fluent conversation." What may look like fluent conversation to most people does not necessarily look fluent to professionals who work with people with intellectual disabilities. Ask a few more probing questions and it may become clear that the person cannot adequately answer questions requiring deeper logical reasoning, or that their speech sounds plausible because it contains many ordinary words even though the words are being used in the wrong places.

At the meeting, for example, participants spoke enthusiastically. Group leaders-usually people with intellectual disabilities who had received years of training and had considerable experience participating in activities-would remind others that "each person only gets two votes" or that "people here need to pay attention," and would appropriately check on others. Even so, most participants tended toward one-way expression rather than back-and-forth verbal exchange.

We interviewed one participant who had spoken very fluently during her presentation and used language with unusual precision. I asked what she had wanted to share when she raised her hand earlier to talk about singing. She told me about attending a singing class at a local foundation, saying it had been arranged by an "assistant" and was "sort of vocational." I asked whether "vocational" meant that the singing class was job training. She said no-it was just an interest. I also asked who the "assistant" was and how that role differed from a social worker, but by the end of the conversation I still could not fully determine what she meant.

After checking with the social worker, we learned that the phrase "sort of vocational" carried a fairly complicated background. The foundation had contracted with the government to provide employment services, primarily helping people with disabilities obtain and maintain employment. It had also helped the people with intellectual disabilities served by the project form a highly autonomous club, with professionals assisting only as needed. The singing class was part of the club's activities, not part of the employment-services program-more like an interest group open to participants than a vocational-training course. The "assistant" was essentially the same concept as the "supporter" used by PAPID Taiwan: a professional staff member at the foundation. A person with an intellectual disability may understand what assistance each role provides and know that the role is called an "assistant" at the club and a "supporter" at PAPID Taiwan, yet still find it difficult to explain orally how the two roles are similar or different-or may not fully grasp what the comparative question is asking.

Deputy Secretary-General Sun I-Hsin also gave an example. Ask a person with an intellectual disability, "Am I handsome?" and they may answer, "Handsome." Ask instead, "I'm not handsome, am I?" and they may simply follow the wording at the end and answer, "Not handsome." Sun also described an example he often uses when teaching at the Judges Academy: in one case, a prosecutor asked, "Did you steal this bicycle?" and the person answered, "Yes." The prosecutor then said, "If you didn't steal this bicycle, you can say you didn't," and the person answered, "I didn't."

The social worker explained that people with intellectual disabilities may express themselves differently from others. If we mistakenly assume that an exchange is fully fluent and therefore see no need for a social worker to assist in court, we may misunderstand what the person is actually trying to express, potentially leading to an unfavorable judgment.

"They give you an answer-for example, you ask whether something is good or bad, and they say it is bad. It's not that you refuse to accept the answer; maybe you were distracted and didn't hear clearly, or they spoke too softly, so you ask again. To them, that may mean, 'Huh? I already answered. Why are you asking again? Was my answer wrong?' So they immediately change their answer."

In the cases discussed above, defendants were still convicted or faced prosecutorial appeals even after their intellectual disabilities were disclosed. But an even more difficult threshold may be recognizing the disability in the first place. Identifying an intellectual disability "by eye" is far more difficult than many people imagine. Even after social workers had explained some of these issues to us, at the meeting-where we did not know the participants-we found it nearly impossible to tell who was a participant, who was a caregiver, and who was staff. The nuances involved in "identification" are genuinely subtle and varied.

Moving Beyond the Quagmire of "Visual Observation" and Finding Better Methods

During the interview, Attorney Li Ai-Lun shared her experience handling these cases:

"For people with intellectual disabilities, the issue is not necessarily Article 19 in the way it may be for people with psychiatric disabilities. Once Article 19 is invoked, an expert evaluation is required, which can be cumbersome and also depends on whether the judge is willing to order one. The key question is often intent: how should intent be determined? In that case, he genuinely believed he was looking for work. The judge even asked him, 'So you give someone the account and get NT$30,000? There's a job like that?' He answered, 'Yes, I believe there is a job like that.' He said it with complete sincerity. So how do you make that visible?"

"We cannot begin with a preconceived idea of what a person with an intellectual disability must look like. They may look perfectly ordinary walking down the street. In our case, if you did not talk to him, he would seem no different from any passerby. I think the first hurdle is for judges and prosecutors to recognize that there may be a cognitive issue requiring attention."

"In similar cases, I also try to have a social worker or close family member serve as an assistant. I think that helps, because a third person-not the client and not the lawyer-can describe the person's condition. That third-party account can be very useful."

We asked what role a disability certificate (formerly called a "disability handbook"; because many people with disabilities and their families still use the older term, the two are often used interchangeably in practice) should play in cases like these.

Social worker Yang responded:

"Of course, a disability certificate cannot by itself tell you whether the person knew, at the time of the alleged offense, whether they should or should not do something. But to me, once you know the person has that certificate, you should know that they need additional assistance. Otherwise, what is the certificate for? No one ever said a disability certificate can only be tied to social-welfare benefits. This is a person with a disability who may need different conditions and additional support so that they can be tried on an equal footing before the law."

Deputy Secretary-General Sun I-Hsin added:

"The certificate is primarily used for social-welfare purposes. Whether a person is exempt from punishment or entitled to a reduced sentence generally does require an expert evaluation. But in principle, we do not want every case to have to go through an evaluation procedure."

"The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) requires procedural accommodations. You cannot wait to see how many resources the Judicial Yuan has before providing reasonable accommodation. In a case like this, if a party has a disability, the system first has to identify it. The judiciary should have an electronic gateway to relevant government databases; checking this information should essentially be as simple as an online query."

"I think prosecutors, police, and the judicial system should have operating guidelines or points of attention built into a flowchart: every case should be checked at the outset. Once a disability is identified, the Legal Aid Foundation should be notified, which would also trigger the process of locating an assistant or witness. This does not require statutory amendment and does not dictate how a judge should decide the case, but an auxiliary mechanism like this is necessary to prevent cases from repeatedly ending in wrongful convictions."

Information-sharing channels and operating guidelines of this kind sound basic. Yet we later learned that district prosecutors offices do not have direct authority to query disability-status information in the Ministry of Health and Welfare's systems.

Deputy Secretary-General Sun also noted during the interview: "Internally, we need to think about this and bring in teachers to review how we can help the people we serve deal with online scams-for example, by offering literacy workshops for young people with mild intellectual disabilities." Strengthening people's ability to recognize scams is one part of addressing dummy-account cases. But if people with intellectual disabilities still become caught up in such cases, there appear to be many procedural safeguards and rules on the use of information that deserve attention. With those safeguards in place, there is at least a chance that more cases will unfold like Li O-Chi's: the person's disability is identified, a lawyer provides assistance, relevant evidence is investigated, and the facts can be properly reconstructed.

When people with intellectual disabilities encounter dummy-account fraud cases, the story is clearly not over.