Taipei prosecutors have indicted a former engineer at Chunghwa Telecom, alleging that he used an internal work account to place a cloud account linked to his own company, LAB Space, into a non-billing state and kept it there for nearly six years. Prosecutors said the arrangement left Chunghwa Telecom short at least NT$33 million in cloud service fees.
The case was first reported in detail by ETtoday News Cloud. According to the report and the indictment, Chunghwa Telecom found irregularities during a cloud billing review in February 2023, when it discovered that charges tied to a group of accounts did not match billing records. The company traced the issue to a veteran surnamed Li who held maintenance privileges in its cloud operations unit and was also the de facto person in charge of LAB Space.
Before the scheme came to light, Li allegedly worried that any website outage affecting customers he handled would expose the arrangement. Prosecutors said he forged a notice in Chunghwa Telecom’s name claiming the company was about to move servers and that websites could briefly lose connectivity, using that message to ease client concerns and buy time to deal with the fallout.
A single billing switch kept the system silent
The indictment describes a simple mechanism. In Chunghwa Telecom’s cloud billing backend, each tenant account had a setting that determined whether billing would be generated. Once an account was switched to a non-billing status, the system would no longer calculate charges on a regular schedule or issue invoices.
Prosecutors said Li began using his maintenance access in 2017 to move LAB Space’s rented cloud account into that status and kept it there until Chunghwa Telecom discovered it in February 2023.
The report said cloud-service billing relied on automated scheduling, while audits often only caught problems after accounting discrepancies appeared. Maintenance accounts also had a legitimate purpose: they could be used to simulate customer scenarios during troubleshooting. That made the activity difficult to spot at the time and helped it continue for nearly six years.
One person held both system access and a private business interest
The report points to Li’s dual role as a key reason the arrangement continued unchecked.
At Chunghwa Telecom, Li had been employed since Sept. 8, 2004. He worked for years in the cloud machine-room unit, handling frontline tasks such as equipment maintenance and resolving connectivity issues. Because of that role and seniority, he had an official account that allowed business testing and customer-environment simulation so maintenance staff could directly enter the system when necessary.
Outside the company, Li was also the de facto head of LAB Space, formally known as Layer Digital Space Co., Ltd. The report said he understood the market demand for cloud services, and once his internal maintenance authority overlapped with his own business, the non-billing switch became a ready-made tool.
LAB Space took external projects while costs stayed off the books
After the account was moved into non-billing status, LAB Space was effectively using Chunghwa Telecom’s cloud resources to support its own website development business. The indictment specifically named the Taipei Culture Foundation as one of its clients.
The report also said a review of LAB Space’s website showed other publicly listed clients and partners, including the Tourism Administration of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, Beitou Hot Spring Museum, National Taipei University, the Life Insurance Association, and ADATA Technology. Its service listings also mentioned cloud infrastructure.
During the period in question, billing records showed irregularities, and the report said misuse of other parties’ cloud services could not be ruled out. The operation was not fully exposed until Chunghwa Telecom reviewed its accounts in February 2023. Prosecutors later concluded that the non-billing setup caused at least NT$33 million in cloud service fee losses and charged Li with breach of trust, offenses involving unauthorized computer use, and document forgery.
The case highlights a gap in internal access control
The case underscores weaknesses in internal permission management. According to the report, a single engineer was able to disable billing through one backend setting, and Chunghwa Telecom only discovered the issue after accounting anomalies appeared, nearly six years after the first alleged change.
The report noted that this was not Chunghwa Telecom’s first internal-control controversy. In 2019, prosecutors indicted 49 people in a separate sham-transaction case involving losses of more than NT$400 million. In another separate matter, six people, including a former deputy head at the Chiayi operations office, were linked to a fabricated rebar procurement case that caused NT$34.11 million in losses; the Chiayi District Court handed down suspended sentences in November 2025.
The report said those earlier matters were unrelated to the current cloud-account case, though all pointed to the same issue: internal audits often detected problems years after the fact.
Recent Taiwan tech cases have centered on misuse of job authority
The report added that Taiwan’s technology sector has recently seen a string of cases involving employees using job-related access for personal gain, from chip-smuggling disputes to cloud billing loopholes. For Chunghwa Telecom, the immediate warning from this case is how to preserve necessary testing authority for operations staff while preventing a single account from bypassing billing controls for an extended period.