A young man has been arrested for investigation after he was found cheating nearly 100 people of a huge amount of money by using Facebook accounts stolen from overseas Vietnamese.

Nguyen Hung Duong (R) listens to his arrest warrant in Da Nang on November 11, 2016. Tuoi Tre

Nguyen Hung Duong, 22, has been put in custody for 4 months on charges of “using computers, telecom network and the Internet to appropriate assets,” a representative from the Da Nang Police Department said Friday.

Duong is in fact a resident of the nearby Quang Tri Province, but moved to Da Nang to study cooking, and information and communications technology, according to police officers. He later started to learn hacking techniques and use the knowledge for fraudulent purposes.

The local police officers began to probe the case in October, after 6 months of investigation following numerous reports from overseas Vietnamese, who said their Facebook accounts had been hacked.

According to the local police officers, Duong made friends with many overseas Vietnamese via Facebook with the only goal of luring them into clicking a link to a malicious website, where they would lose their Facebook login credentials.

The young man managed to steal nearly 100 Facebook accounts through the technique. After hijacking the accounts, Duong first carefully read the conversation history of those Facebook users to impersonate them when talking with their friends in Viet Nam via Facebook Messenger.

In those fraudulent conversations, Duong asked the victims in Viet Nam to buy prepaid mobile phone cards for him to receive big commission. The offer is $10 for a 100,000 VND ($4.5) card, and $50 for a 500,000 VND ($22.5) card.

After receiving the cards from the victims, Duong would convert the virtual money into real one and had it transferred to his bank accounts for personal use.

Duong has managed to cheat nearly 100 people into buying cards for him since 2015, swindling a total of nearly 2 billion VND ($89,286), police said.

The victims mostly reside in big cities such as Ha Noi, Ho Chi Minh City and Can Tho. The biggest victim lost more than 50 million VND ($2,232) in the fraud.

(Source: Tuoitrenews)