Taiwan's police broke up a cross-border drug ring that shipped cannabis into the country inside mattresses, using romance scams to trick strangers into receiving the packages.

• Customs at Taipei port found 24 slabs of cannabis, worth about NT$52 million, packed into four mattresses mailed from Canada.
• The ring was led by a man in his 30s tied to the Bamboo Union gang, one of Taiwan's biggest crime groups.
• To hide the trail, he posed online as a woman using stolen photos and got two men — a soldier and an air-conditioning worker — to accept the parcels for him.
• Police made three rounds of arrests between April and August across northern and southern Taiwan, picking up seven people including drivers, lookouts and the boss.
• Five have been charged under drug and organized-crime laws; the two men used as unwitting recipients were cleared.

Outlook: The case heads to court in Taipei, and police are likely to keep watching international parcel routes from Canada, a common source for cannabis smuggled into Asia.