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Emergency Help

If you are dealing with a compromised account, money already sent to a scam, a lost device, stalking, domestic violence, or a sudden loss of connectivity, this page is a list of what you can do now, sorted by situation, written to be followed under pressure.

This is not legal advice and does not replace professional help. If the situation is urgent, contact the helplines below first.

Helpline numbers are jurisdiction-specific

The numbers on this page are for Taiwan, where this community is based and where we can verify them. They will not work elsewhere.

If you are in another jurisdiction, the sections on accounts, devices, connectivity, and doxxing apply as written, since they involve no local services. For anything needing a phone call, find your own jurisdiction's equivalent first. The international resources at the end of this page work from anywhere.

Helplines in Taiwan, available 24 hours

Free to call, and most offer anonymous consultation.

  • 113: the national protection line run by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, covering domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and the protection of children, older people, and people with disabilities. Interpretation is available in English, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai, and Japanese, which matters if Mandarin is not your first language
  • 110: police, for immediate threats to physical safety and crimes in progress
  • 165: anti-fraud advice, for verifying a suspected scam. If money has already left your account, call this immediately, and see the timing below. Free from a landline, and one NT dollar per minute from most mobile carriers. Reports can also be filed at 165.npa.gov.tw
  • 1925: the Ministry of Health and Welfare's 24-hour mental health and suicide prevention line, free of charge. 1995 is a separate service run by Lifeline Taiwan, a non-governmental organization

Not a 24-hour line, and worth knowing about:

  • iWIN: the reporting channel for online harms involving people under 18, at i.win.org.tw. Reports are filed online, and the phone line operates on weekdays only during office hours

Finding the equivalent where you are

Emergency numbers, domestic violence lines, and anti-fraud reporting differ by jurisdiction, and getting one wrong costs time you may not have. The reliable route is your own government's official portal or your bank's fraud line, which is printed on the back of your card. For digital security specifically, the Access Now Digital Security Helpline supports journalists, human rights defenders, and activists in multiple languages from anywhere.

Money has already gone to a scam

Call 165 first, read afterwards

The legal window for freezing the funds is 24 hours from the moment they are held, and the time spent reading this counts against it.

This section describes Taiwan's mechanism specifically, both the number and the 24-hour statutory window. Elsewhere, call your bank's fraud line immediately, which is printed on the back of your card, and ask whether your jurisdiction has an equivalent short window for freezing a transfer. Most do, and the length differs.

Immediately

  1. Call 165 and give three things: what happened, the recipient account, and the amount and time of the transfer. 165 notifies the receiving financial institution to hold the funds, stopping withdrawal and onward transfer
  2. Or go to any bank branch and tell the counter you have been defrauded. Once staff confirm your identity and the transfer record, they call 165 on your behalf, and police attend the branch within two hours to take the report. If you are away from home without the paperwork, having bank staff make the call is faster
  3. Then complete the report at a police station as soon as possible: A phone call alone, without a filed report, means the hold lapses when the 24 hours expire
  4. Stop contacting the other party: An offer to refund you after one more fee is the standard follow-up scam
  5. Keep all the evidence: transfer records or screenshots, message history, the account details, and the site or app screens. Do not delete anything yet

What the 24 hours means

The hold applies to that transfer rather than freezing an entire account. Within 24 hours of the hold, police have to decide whether to flag the recipient account. Without that notification, the bank releases the hold and the funds become available to withdraw.

This is why calling and going to the station later does not work. Filing the report is what gives police the basis to act.

Whether the money comes back

It depends on whether the funds are still in the account. Where they remain and have not been withdrawn, the Fraud Crime Hazard Prevention Act provides a route for the financial institution to return the remaining balance on notification from the judicial police, which is currently the only path with a clear statutory basis. Where the funds have already been withdrawn or moved on, which is standard practice for organized fraud, the chances drop sharply and what remains is civil action.

The same Act contains provisions most people do not know about and worth asking the officer handling your case about: judicial personnel are required to advise you whether you qualify for legal aid, victims bringing civil claims for damages are temporarily excused from paying court and enforcement fees in advance, and multiple victims may consolidate their claims.

Afterwards

  • Change every password connected to the incident, online banking and email first, following account compromise below
  • Lower your online banking transfer limits, disable transfers to unregistered accounts, and turn on per-transaction notifications. Those three together set the ceiling on the next loss
  • The everyday baseline is in an everyday baseline, which treats fraud as the main source of actual loss for ordinary people

Account compromise

First five minutes

  1. Sign in from another device you trust and check whether you still have access
  2. Change the password immediately and store the new one in a password manager rather than the browser
  3. Turn on two-factor authentication. If it was already on and the second factor has also been changed, start the service's account recovery process
  4. Sign out all other sessions, which most services offer under security or devices

Next thirty minutes

  • Check recent sign-in history, the sent folder, and third-party application authorizations for unfamiliar addresses, messages you did not send, and apps you do not recognize
  • Revoke every suspicious third-party authorization
  • Warn contacts who may have been messaged in your name, since social engineering usually follows
  • If the compromised account is email, treat it as the priority. Email is the recovery channel for everything else

Afterwards

Lost or stolen device

Immediately

  1. From another device, sign in to the manufacturer's or platform's find-my-device service, mark it lost, and trigger remote locking
  2. Report the SIM card lost to your carrier, since SMS codes are a common route into other accounts
  3. Change the passwords for every service signed in on that device, from another device
  4. Where fraud may follow, call your local anti-fraud line, which in Taiwan is 165

Reporting it

  • File a police report, in Taiwan by calling 110 or going to a local station, and obtain the acknowledgement, which carriers and insurers often require
  • Provide the device serial number and IMEI to police and your carrier. Storing those somewhere in advance saves time you will not have

Afterwards

  • Check whether cloud backups have been downloaded unexpectedly
  • Assess the risk of anything that existed only on that device, such as passwords, private keys, or scanned documents
  • Further reading: what is Tails, for an amnesic operating system as an alternative for sensitive work

Stalking and online harassment

Assessing the situation

  • Does the person harassing you know, or can they find, your home, workplace, or daily routes?
  • Has it extended to family, friends, employers, or colleagues?
  • Have there been specific threats, or unwanted physical approaches?

Getting help

In Taiwan, 113 provides consultation and assessment and can refer you to social workers. Ordinary and temporary protective orders can be applied for by the person at risk, through the family court. An emergency protective order works differently: under the Domestic Violence Prevention Act only a prosecutor, the police, or the municipal competent authority can apply for one, so the route to it is through the police rather than the court directly, and the court has to issue it within four hours of receiving the application. The Stalking and Harassment Prevention Act, in force since 2022, provides a basis for criminal prosecution of unwanted approaches, following, harassing calls, and unsolicited deliveries.

Local support organizations in Taiwan include the Modern Women's Foundation, the Garden of Hope Foundation, and the Taipei Women's Rescue Foundation, alongside each municipality's domestic violence and sexual assault prevention centre.

Elsewhere, the equivalent is your jurisdiction's national domestic violence line or a specialist NGO. Both exist in most jurisdictions in this region, and what they can do procedurally varies considerably.

Digital steps to take alongside

Domestic or intimate partner violence

Physical safety comes before digital safety. If the situation is urgent, call emergency services.

What follows is the digital preparation for someone who has not yet left, or is in the process of leaving:

  • Search history, location history, and message history on a shared device may be examined. Arrange a device the other person does not know about, which can be a public library computer or a trusted friend's phone
  • Shared cloud and family location plans may show your location, so check before deciding whether to leave
  • Tracking applications are sometimes installed on a survivor's device. If your location still seems known after leaving, ask police or a protection line for help checking
  • The full process is in digital preparation for domestic violence survivors

Cut off, censored, or blocked

  • A specific site will not load: check with OONI Probe or OONI Explorer whether it is individual or regional. ASN observation coverage shows the current measurement picture
  • The whole home connection is down: first establish whether it is a carrier fault by calling their support. If you suspect it is targeted, record the time, IP address, service name, and screenshots
  • Cross-border connections are restricted: try Tor Browser with a built-in bridge (obfs4, Snowflake, meek-azure). Tor Snowflake covers running one yourself
  • Tor will not connect at all: request unlisted bridges from bridges.torproject.org, or by emailing [email protected] with get transport obfs4 in the body. The email request only works from a Riseup or Gmail address. WebTunnel bridges, which look like ordinary HTTPS traffic, are requested this way rather than found in the browser's built-in list

Install this site as an offline app while you still have connectivity

When the connection is gone, so is this page. While you can still reach it, installing the documentation site as an app puts the core sections on your device to read offline.

Worth doing now

This is preparation. Installing it after the connection drops is too late, and it takes a minute.

Installation steps, what ends up on the device, and how to pick what to keep are all on Offline reading. That page is also where you land when there is no connection.

Personal data exposed or published (doxxing)

Immediately

  1. Screenshot the evidence, including the URL, the time of posting, and who posted it
  2. Report it to the platform, attaching the evidence and stating clearly that it infringes personal data
  3. Where the platform does not respond, your jurisdiction's data protection authority is the next step. In Taiwan that is the Personal Data Protection Commission's preparatory office (in Chinese), the Commission itself not yet being formally established, and for material involving people under 18, iWIN
  4. Consider consulting a lawyer about civil or criminal action

Alongside

Travelling or working across borders

  • Access Now Digital Security Helpline: accessnow.org/help, digital security support for journalists, human rights defenders, and activists, in multiple languages, from anywhere
  • Your own foreign ministry's emergency assistance line: For Taiwanese nationals, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs emergency centre is 0800-085-095 free of charge within Taiwan, or +886-800-085-095 from abroad at your own cost. A separate toll-free line for nationals overseas, 800-0885-0885, works from 22 countries and territories and is the one to use if you have no money on the phone
  • Your embassy or representative office, and local police channels, both worth looking up before travelling

After it is over

  • Write down what you did, as a reference for next time or for someone else. It does not need to be public
  • Assess the scope of the exposure: which passwords are still unchanged, which accounts are still unchecked
  • Work through how to build a threat model again, since the experience may have changed what you are protecting, who from, and what you are willing to spend
  • Fill in the everyday baseline in an everyday baseline. This page handles the incident, that one handles not having it again
  • Seek psychological support where it would help

What we cannot do

This is a technical community, not a legal service, a counselling service, or law enforcement. We can compile tools and resources so you can decide, share experience on digital protection, and refer you to organizations that specialize in what you need.

We cannot file a case on your behalf, issue a protective order, perform forensics on a device, or give legal advice. If the situation is urgent, contact the professional lines first.

If you would like to help maintain or strengthen the resources on this page, particularly for jurisdictions other than Taiwan, the channels on Community services reach us.