Taiwanese and Chinese police are cooperating in efforts to fight fraudsters and have launched the biggest-ever coordinated operation on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, the Criminal Investigation Bureau said Monday. The bureau said Taiwanese police cracked down on 57 locations in 12 counties that day, arresting 66 suspects and seizing NT$60 million (US$1.87 million) , while police in China simultaneously struck thousands of locations in more than 20 provinces. Stopping scams has been named as the top priority this year for China's police. Taiwan and China signed an agreement in April 2009 to assist each other on judicial matters and cooperate in fighting crime. Since then, the two sides have held a series of meetings and discussions in which they agreed to work together on scams, as they are a major problem for both, the bureau said. The two sides have together busted more than 60 scam groups operating across the Taiwan Strait, with over 400 people arrested and some NT$10 billion in unlawful gains seized since the agreement went into effect last year. The bureau said that compared to the more-than 24,000 cases of scam and fraud involving some NT$7 billion in the first half of 2009, about 20,000 cases involving NT$4 billion were reported in the same period of this year, which shows that the situation remains serious. 