Normal scales can be modified by “scale magicians” in Ho Chi Minh City in a short moment to make things weigh up to 20kg more than they actually do, a recent Tuoi Tre (Youth) investigation has found. The customers of these scale modifiers are traders who want to cheat their customers out of weight when selling goods to them. N.V.C., a 40-year-old man of the northern province of Hai Duong, who has spent 15 years hawking fruit along streets in Ho Chi Minh City, said, “As common sense, whenever people see cheap prices written on the cardboard erected from tricycles loaded with fruit along streets, they rush to buy it. In fact, many of the buyers will never enjoy any cheap prices, as the actual weight of the fruit they bought may be up to 50 percent less than the weight shown on the trader’s scale, C. told Tuoi Trecorrespondents. The A Danh scale shop, located near the Thu Duc farm produce wholesale market in Thu Duc District, has been notorious over the past several years for its “professional” modifications of scales for traders who want to use “cheating scales” to dupe their customers. On Tuesday afternoon, the Tuoi Tre reporters, posing as fruit peddlers, came to the shop along with a 5kg scale. The shop displayed many scales of various kinds for sale in its front part, but in another area located deeper inside, there were three people, aged 20-30, working on old scales. It looked like they were repairing them. In fact, these “repairers” were turning normal scales into cheating tools, upon orders placed by their customers.

When seeing the reporters entering with a scale, one of the young men asked, “How many grams above the actual weight do you want the scale to indicate? Before they could reply, he continued to ask, “100 grams or 400 grams?” The reporters then answered that they wanted a difference of 300 grams.

“The charge is VND10,000 [US$0.46] for a 100-gram modification, but we will charge you only VND20,000 this time,” the young man said, and handed the scale to another staffer in the shop. That staffer then rapidly disassembled the scale. He used a pair of pincers to clamp an end of the spring inside the scale and lengthened it a bit.

He moved on to reassemble the scale and put a 1kg weight on it, but the needle of the scale indicated a weight of 1.3kg, which means his modification matched the target.The Tuoi Tre reporters visited another scale modifier located on Hau Giang Street in Ward 2, District 6. This shop is owned by a 42-year-old man, named Nam. Looking at the scale the reporters showed him, Nam asked, “What level of modification do you want?” and his guests replied, “200 grams.” Nam also charged VND20,000 for manipulating the spring of the scale to turn it into a cheating tool. He said he could modify scales of various weighing capacities, ranging from 5kg to 100kg.

Another “scale magician” is Quan, whose house is situated on Hiep Binh Street in Hiep Binh Chanh Ward, Thu Duc District. Quan not only modifies scales brought in by his customers, but he also renews old scales and adjusts their springs before selling them to traders who want to con their customers. Besides the manual scale modification, some “scale magicians” fix a chip to a scale and then use a tiny remote controller, the size of a match box, to activate the device to indicate virtual weights – higher or lower than actual weights – on the scale at their will. Nam, a man aged over 60 in the Kim Bien Market in District 5, toldTuoi Tre that this “hi-tech” scale is prized at VND8 million ($367), and that delivery can be made within three days on receipt of the order from a customer. Such a “smart” scale, of the 100kg kind, was used by a couple from Ho Chi Minh City whose trick was uncovered while they bought fish from fishermen in Xuan Loc District in the southern province of Dong Nai in 2009. The couple utilized a small remote control to lower the actual weight of the fish each time they were weighed. The sellers found the scale to be very suspicious, so they called police officers, who arrived and discovered that the scale had been fixed with a chip. Police reweighed the fish and found the real weight to be about 2.5 metric tons, 700kg heavier than what had been weighed with the manipulated scale before.