Sidelights | Seminar on Practical Responses in the Post-Dummy Account Era | Tainan Session

Introduction

The evolution of dummy account cases has reached a "post-dummy account era." Why "post"? Because they no longer resemble their initial forms; punishments for handing over dummy accounts and judicial practices have both evolved. With the implementation of Article 15-2 of the Money Laundering Control Act, are we officially entering the post-dummy account era, and will the massive burden that numerous aiding-fraud or dummy account cases have placed on our judicial system be alleviated?

Keynote Speaker | Attorney Ch'iao Cheng-Hsiang, Director of the Case Action Department, JRF

• Sharing on the Evolution of Dummy Account Cases

1. Judicial practice initially handled the provision of accounts as aiding and abetting fraud based on conditional intent. However, conditional intent underwent a qualitative change in dummy account cases, transforming into a form akin to presumed guilt. Furthermore, under the standard of judgment for ordinary intellectual life, courts often glossed over the matter with empty generalizations, failing to consider whether this imposed excessively high obligations on the people. Since Ruling No. 3101 of the Supreme Court's 2019 Grand Chamber established that the act of providing an account should be punished as an accomplice to money laundering, the result has been that merely providing a bank ATM card and password to an unknown person constitutes being an accomplice to the crime of money laundering.
2. Under Article 14 of the Money Laundering Control Act, the principal sentence for aiding money laundering is imprisonment for not more than 7 years, meaning fines cannot be commuted, and commutation is restricted only to community service. Commutation to community service is currently the mainstream approach. However, this also tests whether defendants can meet the requirements of community service, and those who fail to comply often end up having to serve prison time to resolve the matter. As for the amendment to Article 15-2 of the Money Laundering Control Act, there are currently very few applicable cases in practice, and its effectiveness in improving this phenomenon remains to be observed.
3. There have been Supreme Court judgments proposing additional requirements and standards for the standard of judgment regarding ordinary intellectual life.
4. Article 15-2 of the Money Laundering Control Act is considered capable of reducing the judicial burden, but its effectiveness is questionable. Moreover, the restrictions it places on accounts seem both similar to and different from the functions of traditional alert accounts, raising a new issue of whether interested parties need to seek remedies.
5. Acquittals are primarily rendered in cases where verification was conducted or where the defendants continued to use their original accounts. Defense strategies may also consider avenues such as psychiatric evaluations.
6. Following an acquittal, individuals may still face the possibility of claims for unjust enrichment and damages for civil negligence torts.

Panelist | Judge Chang Yü-Sheng, Taiwan Tainan District Court

1. There is no need to compare the old and new laws regarding Article 15-2 of the Money Laundering Control Act; this is a settled view of the Supreme Court. As the keynote speaker just mentioned, the "principle of prohibition with exceptions of permission" model under Article 15-2 is also rare in our legislative precedents, creating difficulties in adjudication. Moreover, the legislative reasoning explicitly excludes applying for loans or job interviews as justifiable reasons, which has led legal practice to strictly follow this standard.
2. The boundaries between aiding fraud, the conditional intent of aiding money laundering, and the proviso of Article 15-2 of the Money Laundering Control Act are very blurred, making these matters extremely difficult to determine. Prosecutors currently tend to assert all of them and dump the burden onto the courts for adjudication.
3. Dummy account-related cases actually spawn many practical issues, including procedural issues (such as whether, in the same case with different remittances, a previous non-prosecution disposition bars subsequent prosecution/or even issues regarding the alteration of statutory provisions of prosecution) and substantive issues.
4. The panelist has compiled several practical standards for the defense's reference. What kinds of arguments or evidence are more likely to secure an acquittal? The key remains whether the defendant can provide complete evidence of the deception process (such as complete screenshots of chat logs), or whether the account handed over still contained deposits or was actively in use.

Panelist | Attorney Kuo Hao-Jen, Executive Director, JRF

1. Regarding the issue of convicting dummy accounts, our Criminal Code prescribes standards such as conscious negligence and unconscious negligence. However, in dummy account cases, the standard of negligence simply vanishes, and courts directly build convictions starting from indirect intent.
2. Individuals involved in fraud cases are often vulnerable people such as runaways, or young people looking to make quick money. However, these individuals are actually at the very bottom rung of the fraud syndicate, with zero possibility of moving up. Some citizens, after being scammed, even become dummy accounts themselves out of an attempt to retrieve their lost money. In current fraud-aiding and related cases involving fraud syndicates, obtaining an acquittal can be described as a miracle, which can be seen from various statistical figures.
3. Parties must endure the grueling torment of prolonged trial stages if they deny the charges, often leading them to simply confess and pay compensation in exchange for probation or a lenient sentence.
4. The Ministry of Justice's criminal policy is fundamentally a failure. Its extremely high case-clearance rate is built on arresting dummy account holders or couriers, and these individuals are heavily concentrated among the youth. Our country must seriously reflect on this issue: have we genuinely studied the causes of crime or even proposed appropriate countermeasures? Government awareness campaigns are often a step behind, making it difficult to prevent the occurrence of fraud cases.
5. The presumption of guilt against defendants has also spilled over to lawyers defending them. Nowadays, whenever lawyers take on similar fraud syndicate cases, they are suspected of colluding with the syndicate. This constitutes a severe obstruction to the right to defense.