Vietnam authorities have expelled two Liberian nationals for attempting to cheat two Vietnamese women through a dollar banknote scam.

>> VN seizes Liberians for ‘banknote washing’ scam>> Foreigners cheat local woman off $67,000 with banknote scam The scam artists, Golokeh SamBass, 37, and Karbar Patrich, 39, were escorted from Khanh Hoa Province’s Nha Trang City, where they had been detained, to Ho Chi Minh yesterday for deportation. The two men, who have been charged with “swindling to appropriate assets,” will be banned from entering Vietnam for a five year period from the date of expulsion, said Colonel Truong Vinh Quang, head of the security investigation division of the provincial Police Department. On June 15, provincial police, acting on a tip from a source, raided a house in Loc Tho Ward in Nha Trang city and caught the swindlers showing their trick to two women an effort to lure the women into giving them US$10,000. They told the women that they had been granted US$1 million by the U.S. government for use in projects in Vietnam and Africa. Before entering Vietnam, they had used a black chemical to cover the banknotes for safety purposes, so that it would not be noticed during transportation, they told their potential victims. They then said they wanted $10,000 to buy an expensive, specific chemical which would “wash” the black banknotes and return them to their original state. In order to gain trust from their victims, they washed a black banknote until it looked like a normal one by dipping it into a special solution. A similar case occurred in April, when a group of foreigners cheated a 40-year-old Vietnamese woman out of US$67,000 by dipping USD banknotes into chemicals. The woman, in Ho Chi Minh City, later discovered that all the “washed” money given to her by the foreigners was fake. Yet another case happened in 2008, when police in HCMC arrested OkoroJi Promse aka Adam, a 31-year-old Nigerian, who used the same trick to cheat a 48-year-old Vietnamese man in District 12, Tran Tuan Vu, out of $60,000.