Ten people arrested for faking MPS’s hotline and thieving VND 500 billion

Thứ Ba, 21/01/2020, 10:35

The Department of Cyber Security and Hi-tech Crime Prevention in coordination with the Quang Nam Provincial Police Department, recently discovered and cracked down on a group of criminals faking hot lines of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) to practice reception and illegally appropriate citizens’ money and assets.

The criminals and exhibits.

The criminals set up a VoIP gateway and simulated the MPS’s hotline for crime reports. Then, they pretended to be police officers or prosecutors, threatening other people that they had been "related to extremely serious criminal cases", such as money laundering and drug-related trafficking.

In doing so, the criminals requested the victims to open new bank accounts, register Internet Banking service, transfer money to the newly-opened accounts and install “MPS applications” created by the criminals. Immediately after the installation was complete, the money in the victim’s accounts was transferred to an unknown account. Some victims did not recognize that they had lost their money in their accounts.

Nearly 90 victims have been deceived and billions of Vietnamese dongs have been illegally appropriated since September 2019. Based on the number of bank cards seized from the criminals, the investigation agency estimated more than VND 500 billion was thieved by the criminals across the country.

The police agency is urgently completing the procedure to prosecute the accused and expand the investigation.

By Thien Minh