Actor Darren Wang among 28 indicted in military service evasion case

New Taipei, June 16 (CNA) A total of 28 individuals, including actor Darren Wang (王大陸), were indicted Monday in a military service evasion case in which conscripts paid to get false medical certificates that got them off from serving in the military.

Of the 28 indicted, 24 were young men called up to perform their compulsory military service while four, including the alleged leader of the scheme named Chen Chih-ming (陳志明), were involved in making it appear that all 24 had serious hypertension, the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office said in a statement Monday.

Wang was the only one of the 24 who did not actually avoid performing his military service, eventually reporting for duty in March 2025.

Prosecutors charged him, however, with forgery of public documents for saying he lost his ID and national health insurance (NHI) cards when he gave them to somebody impersonating him on hospital visits.

The other 27, including Chen, were charged with violating the Punishment Act for Violation to Military Service System for unlawfully altering their physical status to avoid service and violating the Criminal Code by getting public officials to make false entries in official documents.

Prosecutors recommended a sentence of at least five years in prison for Chen given the severity of the offense because he recruited accomplices and enabled a large number of men to avoid military service, making illegal gains of NT$7.63 million (US$258,580) during the process.

The statement did not say what sentences prosecutors recommended for the others indicted.

According to the indictment, Chen collected a total of NT$4.03 million in fees ranging from NT$50,000 to NT$500,000 per person from the men called up other than Wang to help them avoid doing their military service from 2016 to January 2025.

Prosecutors said Chen and his three accomplices taught the conscripts how to manipulate their blood pressure tests by holding their breath or arranged for impostors to wear 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitors.

After getting medical certificates from hospitals diagnosing severe hypertension, the conscripts used them to apply for status changes with local household registration offices or compulsory military service or civil affairs departments, prosecutors alleged.

That led to their status being changed from "active duty" to "under re-evaluation" or "undetermined." Follow-up evaluations at hospitals were arranged, and again impostors with blood pressure monitors were used to obtain false diagnoses.

Those results led to a change in the conscripts' status to "exempt," and they were issued military exemption certificates by the Ministry of the Interior's Conscription Health Evaluation and Review Committee, according to the indictment.

Wang, who had been living abroad for an extended period and could not attend medical appointments in Taiwan, allegedly paid NT$3.6 million to Chen to also avoid military service by claiming a medical illness, prosecutors said.

He handed over his ID and NHI cards to an impostor, but because Chen was imprisoned in January 2025 in another case, the plan was never fully carried out, according to prosecutors, and Wang still had to perform his military service.