Bogus Taiwan Master cons girls with Thai amulets

Couple of days ago there was an article in the Shinmin paper about a high profile religious conman in Taiwan being arrested for his crimes. Zheng Guanqian, has for some years gone around Taipei pretending to be an expert in Maoshan Taoist magic as well as the "only Thai black magic master" in Taiwan. Zheng has appeared on various news programs, paranormal variety shows, magazines and even writes his own books. As a result there were many gullible people who became his followers. He also has a blog about his so-called magical arts as well as an account on Yahoo auction selling Thai amulets. Having set up an altar in his hometown Tucheng, he provided religious services for women suffering from marriage and relationship problems, collecting amounts from 2,000 - 200,000 NTD from them for his rituals and amulets. Zheng sold mainly non-mainstream stuff like animal and human lukkok (seen above) which promised fast results, in line with his crooked personality. Zheng with variety show host Xiao Pan Pan. As we can see he wears a chain of 7 amulets. He started to run afoul of the law when he tricked several of the more attractive girls who came to look for him to perform oral sex for him, with the excuse of making "Metta Oil" for them. Zheng told them that the 2 most important ingredients for the oil was "their saliva and his semen", so naturally oral sex was the only way to acquire them. He promised that this Metta oil will solve whatever problems they had. This went on for a while and eventually some of these girls woke up and reported him to the police. The rest is history. When arrested, some of the cops asked him, "Will those little ghosts (that Zheng rears) help you in court and prison?" Zheng's dejected reply was, "They ran away long ago". Pic of Zheng visiting LP Up of Wat Thongsai, Nakhon Pathom, probably for getting his Mae Nang Pim amulets. The reason that Zheng was able to succeed in his sexual crimes was partially due to a general ignorance about Thai Buddhism and amulets in Taiwan and also Hong Kong. From time to time we hear similar stories of religious conmen tricking girls into having sex with them in the pretext of performing some magic ritual for them to solve their problems. These conmen almost certainly claim either to be Thai, Taoist or Tibetan magic experts, or even all of the above. That is not to say that such crimes don't happen in Singapore and Malaysia, but the people here are relatively more knowledgeable about such things due to our proximity to Thailand. Furthermore there are many different reputable guru monks and Ajarns from Thailand who visit Singapore and Malaysia regularly to meet devotees here. This greatly reduce the chance of bogus masters succeeding in conning a large number of people. As the Chinese saying goes, "When there are no tigers on the mountain, the monkeys declare themselves king". Such is the case in Taiwan and Hong Kong. However if we really want to look for the true cause of such religious crimes, it is that desire to get a quick fix to our problems that turns many people into fools. They fall easy prey to conmen offering magical solutions, ending up losing lots of money or being used and abused if they are attractive females. As such, the wise Luang Pors always teach us not to rely too much on Wicha, but to chant the holy verses and practice Vipassana meditation. Hard to accept as it might be, this is the only real and reliable way to solve our problems.