In early July 2023, H, an accountant of a state-owned corporation, received a message from her husband who told her to transfer VND5 million urgently to solve a problem. H then tried to contact her husband via Messenger, but could not hear clearly and decided to transmit money at once. Later, she was informed by her husband that his Facebook was hacked by scammers who also tricked his other Facebook friends out of money.

Several days ago, P.T.N in Ba Vi district in Hanoi received a call from a person claiming to be a police officer. N was informed that she had violated the law and in order to protect her assets from being sealed and detained, she had to open a bank account and transfer money into the account. The money would be used to serve the investigation. 

N went to the Agribank Ba Vi branch and withdrew all the VND260 million deposits and transferred them to an account given to her. Fortunately, the bank officers reported the case to the police and N escaped swindling.

MISA, a software firm, recently received complaints from some citizens that they were tricked out of money via websites and the app impersonating MISA.

A website at https://misavnp.com/ asks individual users to create an account and join the system and entices people to transfer money to buy goods online so as to get commissions. In fact, this is a new kind of scam. If victims fall into the trap, money is transferred into the scammers’ accounts.

MISA also received complaints about the existence of a mobile app named ‘Misa’ which spreads ads and calls on people to pour money to invest in the so-called ‘data package’ to obtain high profits of up to 40-50 percent. 

The impersonated app asks people to register membership accounts and gives information about the program on purchasing ‘data packages’ to carry out transactions in order to appropriate assets.

Other financial institutions such as TPBank, Sacombank, ACB and ZaloPay meet with the same problems recently. Messages with false content are sent to clients in the names of the institutions.  Users, if accessing fraudulent websites, will be lured to provide personal information such as accounts, passwords and OTP and conduct the operations to transfer money.

The counterfeit messages do not come from the systems of financial institutions, banks and telecom carriers, but they are delivered via fake mobile transmitters. 

The Ministry of Information and Communications has reported that online scamming in the first six months of the year increased by 64.78 percent compared with the same period last year, while the victims were elderly people, children, students and low income workers.

Van Anh