A Taiwanese court has ruled that mailing "ghost money" with a threatening note counts as criminal intimidation, in a case that clarifies where old customs cross the line into a crime.

• A man in Changhua was jailed four months for sending the county council speaker a letter demanding he "deal with" a scratched car, with joss paper tucked inside to signal death.
• The same man used a fake name to send four such letters in one day, three of them to customs officials in Taipei.
• Under Taiwan's Article 305, intimidation means clearly threatening someone's life, body, freedom, reputation, or property in a way that makes them genuinely afraid.
• Burning or scattering ghost money alone usually isn't a crime, since it's a normal funeral custom — but paired with threatening words or gestures, it can become one.
• A pure curse, like wishing someone dead, generally isn't intimidation because it relies on supernatural forces that can't actually be carried out; at most it's a minor public-order offense.

Outlook: Courts will keep weighing the full context — the symbol plus any accompanying threat — rather than the ghost money by itself.