Student in Taiwan faces charges after leg amputation insurance scam

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A 23-year-old university student in Taiwan has had his legs amputated in an alleged insurance scam gone wrong.

Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau recently announced the student, identified as Chang, has been charged with insurance fraud as a result of the scheme.

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According to local media reports, Chang allegedly kept his feet in a bucket filled with dry ice for 10 hours, leading to “severe frostbite and necrosis below the knees.”

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He applied for compensation from eight insurance policies after the amputation, allegedly hoping to pocket about $1.7 million, and claimed the frost bite was the result of riding a scooter at night.

Doctors sensed something was off, though, noting an absence of shoe or sock marks and the symmetry of his injuries, reports Business Insider.

The weather conditions on the night of the alleged incident were also not consistent with frostbite. Beyond that, Chang had taken out multiple insurance policies just days earlier.

Chang allegedly worked with a co-conspirator, also 23, and identified as Liao.

Chang claimed that Liao was the mastermind behind the scheme, concocting a story that gang members were after him for an outstanding debt, when in reality Liao had incurred financial losses from trading cryptocurrency.

The duo were originally high school classmates. The indictment reportedly states that on Jan. 26, 2023, Chang and Liao rode scooters to purchase dry ice in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District. They later returned to Liao’s residence in Taipei City’s Zhongshan District, where he used cable ties to restrain Change to a char while he immersed his feet in the dry ice from 2 a.m. until shortly after noon.

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Liao took photos and recorded some of the incident on his phone, per the indictment.

Chang went to the hospital on Jan. 28, and his legs were amputated below the knees following more than a week of treatment.

While he initially obtained nearly $10,000 through insurance claims, that money has since been seized by prosecutors and both Zhang and Liao have been charged with fraud and embezzlement.

Somewhat unbelievably, a similar insurance scam unfolded in Missouri in November.

In that case, a Missouri man staged a farm equipment accident to appear as though he had lost his feet to a brush hog, a type of rotary mower, in hopes of making an insurance claim.

But when responding medics and law enforcement officers arrived at the scene, the man’s feet were nowhere to be found and his injuries appeared to be too clean to be the result of a brush hog. The man, in his 60s, was a known paraplegic in his lower extremities and authorities were immediately curious about the tourniquets on his legs and who applied them, according to the Springfield News-Leader.

According to police, the man had been aided in the attempted scam by a Florida man, who had cut off the man’s leg with a hatchet.

Investigators later determined that the incident has been an attempt to make a faulty insurance claim, but because the man never formally filed the false claim, he was not charged or identified.

According to police, days after they responded to the scene, a relative found the man’s feet in a bucket on the property, which had been obscured by tires.

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