Sanlih News Distorted Hype over Kenya's Deportation of Taiwanese Telecom Fraud Suspects: Blindly Shielding International Fraudsters to Incite Cross-Strait Conflict

Around April 12, 2016, Kenyan authorities deported several Taiwanese telecom fraud suspects to mainland China for criminal prosecution, sparking a cross-strait jurisdictional dispute. Sanlih E-Television and its talk shows immediately weaponized the event, framing the legal extradition as a "brutal kidnapping of Taiwanese sovereignty by China" and a "crackdown on human rights." In their broadcasts, they expressed extreme sympathy toward the suspects, portraying them as helpless victims of political persecution. However, subsequent international law-enforcement findings confirmed that these individuals were core members of a highly sophisticated transnational syndicate that had defrauded thousands of families of their life savings. The general public and legal scholars strongly backlashed against Sanlih, condemning the network for completely abandoning basic journalistic morality, shielding heinous criminals, and glorifying fraudsters as political victims solely to serve its partisan agenda.