According to Vinacas, the Prime Minister received a report about a scam related to Vietnamese cashew exporters to Italy. The association asked the Prime Minister to direct relevant agencies and Interpol Vietnam to work closely with and to give support to cashew exporters.

The association expects that through specific measures, agencies can help keep the cashew shipments at the port and prevent handover of the goods to anyone even if they present the original bill of lading. They want Vietnamese enterprises to receive the shipments back.

The association has also asked four shipping lines involved in the case, Cosco, Yangming, HMM, and One, to apply "urgent" measures to hold cashew containers that have been and are on their way to ports in Italy, and to give specific instructions for the goods owners to get their goods back if the seller does not receive payment from the buyer's bank.

It has been reported that five Vietnamese cashew nut exporters lost control of 36 containers shipped to Italy after original documents related to these shipments disappeared. The value of the lost goods is more than 7 million USD.

Mr. Tran Huu Hau, Deputy General Secretary of Vinacas, said that five containers arrived at Italy’s ports and have been blocked by Italian police.

In this super scam, Vietnamese cashew exporters used Documents against Payment method with five Vietnamese banks. All these banks use the document delivery service of the famous global courier DHL.

The interests of both banks and shipping lines are intertwined in this very complicated case. The shipping firms have kept the shipments, but the banks in Vietnam and the delivery unit lost all the related documents.

Tran Chung

100 containers of cashew nuts exported to Italy suspected of being scammed

The Vietnam Cashew Association (VINACAS), on the evening of March 8, informed that it had just received an appeal for help from some cashew nut processing and exporting enterprises.