Taiwan using internet to recruit spies, says report

Mainland media have accused Taiwanese intelligence services of using chat rooms, e-mails and online advertisements to recruit spies for the island, claiming that dozens of naive mainlanders have been caught in Taiwan's espionage trap in recent years.

The People's Daily group's Global Times newspaper carried a report yesterday saying the island's intelligence agencies had taken advantage of the internet in the past few years to cultivate spies and collect intelligence on the mainland.

The newspaper said one of the dozens of cases cracked in recent years involved a postgraduate student at a university in Dalian . The student, identified by the alias Zheng Hui, was employed by 'an important unit' and had been sent to study at the university to upgrade his skills.

Zheng's well-informed remarks in military-related chat rooms quickly made him a target for Taiwanese spy agencies and he inadvertently began his career as an intelligence agent when he accepted a request for a stranger to be included on his MSN friends list.

Zheng's Taiwanese contact posed as a magazine reporter in South Korea and asked Zheng to send him military-related journals, academic newspapers and documents. The contact deposited money into Zheng's bank account before the student was arrested for leaking state secrets in November, three months after becoming a spy.

'Taiwanese agencies seek out people with military or government backgrounds as spy candidates,' the newspaper quoted a mainland counter-espionage agency source as saying. 'They haunt chat rooms, trying to acquire information.'