A dramatic growth in the number of internet crimes and fraud cases via social media has been recorded in Viet Nam over recent years. 

The city's police officers arresting a hi-tech offender

In particular, criminals, with their proficiency in IT, have used their deceptive and cunning tricks to illegally appropriate the property of others.  Such cases have caused serious and enormous consequences to internet users, and the community as a whole.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Zalo are currently fertile grounds for online scammers who usually take advantage of victims’ credulity and carelessness to steal individual information, and then illegally appropriate a large sum from them.

Last year, the Economic Crime Investigation Division (PC46) of the Da Nang Department of Police detected and successfully uncovered many hi-tech criminal cases.

In October, for instance, local police officers detained 23-year-old Pham Quoc Thinh from Quang Nam Province’s Dien Ban District, and prosecuted him for ‘using computers, telecom networks and the internet to appropriate assets’.

During his interrogations, Thinh admitted that, between April 2015 and February 2017, he set up many fraudulent prize winning programmes, including thongbaosukien24.com and thongbaonhanqua.com, to extort money from others.

The fraudster sent the links of the fraudulent prize winning programmes mentioned-above to hundreds of Facebook accounts, announcing that their owners had won high value prizes, including a Honda SH 125i valued at 81 million VND and a gift voucher worth 100 million VND.  Then, the offender tried to get the personal information and phone numbers of the victims, and convinced ‘winners’ to send prepaid mobile phone cards as a fee for receiving the prizes. 

Over the period, Thinh successfully cheated a total of about 50 people in many cities and provinces nationwide, swindling a total of nearly 1 billion VND.

Another online scammer, 19-year-old Nguyen Truong Xuan from the province’s Duy Xuyen District, was also apprehended by the city’s police officers in June. 

With the use of the same deceptive tricks as Thinh, Xuan convinced ‘winners’ to send prepaid mobile phone cards worth tens of millions of VND in total from victims nationwide. 

In addition, scammers use social networks such as dating websites or chat rooms to trick their victims into falling in love with them, and then use their victim's trust to deceitfully take their money.

Taking advantage of the victims’ trust and greed, after gaining trust from them, fraudsters usually offer to send high-value presents from overseas which could only be handed to the targets if they pay mandatory ‘fees’ to customs officers.

Many local experts noted that investigations into such cases usually face difficulties because fraudulent transactions are conducted via the internet.  If detected, scammers promptly destroy criminal evidence by deleting allegedly fraudulent websites and data on their computers in a bid to evade capture.

Colonel Vo Van Lanh, the PC46’s Deputy Head, remarked that his unit, over the past years, has become actively engaged in widely reminding the general public to be on a high alert against any online scams.

The Da Nang Department of Police recently asked the Ministry of Information and Communications to take stronger technical measures to prevent internet users from falling victim to scams via social networks.

Moreover, the municipal Department of Information and Communications has already made a list of 25 suspected fraudulent websites in order for them to be widely publicised amongst the general public.