The buying and selling of personal data in Vietnam has become common, widespread and systematic, though the government on July 1, 2023 issued Decree 13/2023 on personal data protection.

VietNamNet reporters discovered that a large amount of personal information was being stored publicly on Telegram after a user showed some clues.

In 2021, on a domestic social network, one could read a post titled “Bot tim chu thue bao tu so dien thoai’ (Bot seeking subscribers from phone numbers). Users were told that they just needed to enter telephone numbers to find out information about subscribers and their Facebook pages. There was a Telegram link introducing the bot and a group exchanging information about how to look up information, also on the same platform.

Users who clicked the link would directly be driven to Telegram and led to an automatic bot named ‘So Dien Thoai’ ('telephone number’ and begin chatting with a bot). Then the user received instructions to begin looking up information with commands. The bot allowed the user to look up information about Facebook, phone number and list of mobile subscribers. Also, the bot allowed the user to find persons according to names, birthdates and cities or provinces.

Users had to pay a fee for the search service. Users had to pay $0.001 for the service of looking up in Facebook. The other services were charged $0.7-0.99, while the highest service fee was $1.25 for the VIP service package. 

In order to use the bot named ‘So Dien Thoai’, users had to pay by transferring cryptocurrencies to the addresses given to them.

However, many people who tried the service said the trial was in vain.

While some people thought it was just a joke, others said an account on Telegram contacted and chatted with them, and shifted them into another group, where they could access more sufficient and standardized data, with the data updated until June 2023. In addition, they were exempted from the fee the first time when searching for information about Facebook, phone number and MoMo accounts.

When looking up a phone number for the first time, they were surprised about the information they could find, including the full name, type of customer, object of customer, user, date of birth, nationality, date of issue, place of issue, household registration, updated time, contract period, transaction location, place of registration, phone number, transaction point, date of use, payment and carrier.

Not only did it allow it to look up information about subscribers, the bot also allowed it to search information about MoMo accounts, electricity bills, car number plates and vice versa. The bot also provided a VIP package allowing buyers to look up information about IDs and seek information by name, year of birth and address.

Users were charged $0.7-0.99 for the search. VIP service packages (from VIP1 to VIP5) were charged $50-199. The most expensive VIP5 was charged $2,000 or more. Searching for Facebook information was free.

With the automatic bot, users could transfer money directly with bank accounts in addition to cryptocurrencies. The bot provided one QR-Code for every account for money transfers.

After that, the users can find out the phone numbers of all the three larger telecom carriers (Viettel, VinaPhone and MobiFone). The results about subscribers were nearly absolutely exact (user, name, age, address, date of birth…etc.).

In addition to looking up phone numbers, the ‘bot also allows one more service – looking up real time with admin. Users just need to have ID numbers to be able to look up information about residential books, social insurance, PC-Covid, healthcare insurance, and look up businesses’ information to find out staff.

An user said that when asking the admin (another Telegram account) to help look up a residential book from an ID of a person, the work took quite a long time (more than one day), but the information was absolutely accurate. The admin then told the user that the data about the residential book could be found by chip-based ID, not by old ID card.

Quoc Trung