A Chinese hand? A recruitment scam to lure Indian experts

Judging from the way an intelligence network is set up, sucha scam is actually a conspiracy by an external hostile force in India, and this hostile force may well be from China.

- CHIENYU SHIH

Recently, there have been rumours in India that the Taiwan Institute for Defence and Security Research (INDSR) is recruiting experts in India and offering them money to write analyses of India’s political and economic policies. This is a complete scam. In the contact email, we can clearly see that the real email address of the INDSR is indsr. org.tw, not indsr.​com.tw. But even so, here is a special reminder that there are likely to be experts in India who are being scammed.

The INDSR is a thinktank funded by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defence (MND) to study a wide range of issues related to Taiwan’s national defence and regional security. It does not currently recruit people to work outside Taiwan.

If one may speculate, such a development would serve several purposes:

First, to take advantage of the current friendly relations between India and Taiwan to recruit and pay Indian experts and scholars on behalf of the INDSR to steal useful information.

Secondly, even if it is discovered after some time and the scam is exposed, or if these scammers do not cooperate well with the local experts and scholars in India, they can completely blame the INDSR in Taiwan for the scam, thus ruining our reputation.

Judging from the way an intelligence network is set up, such a scam is actually a conspiracy by an external hostile force in India, and this hostile force may well be from China.