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Taiwanese posing as cop gets 4 years in phone scam

Taiwanese posing as cop gets 4 years in phone scam

Tuesday, September 30, 2014, 12:28 GMT+7

A Vietnam court has handed down a four-year sentence to a Taiwanese man who posed as a Hanoi-based law enforcement official to swindle people.

>> Vietnam to deport 26 Chinese, Taiwanese for fraud Chieu Chiu Fu, 44, received the sentence on charges of “appropriating property through swindling” pursuant to Article 139 of the Penal Code, the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court said at his trial, which opened on Monday. After arriving in Vietnam in April, Fu met a Vietnamese woman, Vu Thi Hue, and asked her to open a bank account for him to use in his scams. According to the indictment, on May 7, a woman named Xuan, living in District 12, received a phone call in which a man claiming to be a police officer in Hanoi told her that she had been involved in a money-laundering ring. He then asked Xuan to transfer VND78 million (US$3,670) to a given account. After transferring the money, Xuan suspected that she may have been cheated, so she reported the case to police in District 2. On the same day, a man in Binh Tan District also transferred VND10 million ($470) to an account given by Fu, after he was threatened by a caller who posed as a law enforcement officer. Two days later, Fu and Hue were arrested when they arrived at a bank in the northern city of Hai Phong to withdraw the money that had been transferred by their victims.   Fu told police that he had been assigned to go to Vietnam by a man named Luu, to collude with two others, named Dac Y and A Hong, to conduct swindles over the phone. Y and Hong were in charge of making phone calls to their potential victims. Fu then used this account to receive money from their victims, and then transferred them to another account designated by his superior in Taiwan, he said. At yesterday’s hearing, Fu pleaded guilty to the charges stated in the indictment. As the investigation agency has yet to track down Y and Hong, the court tried Fu first, the jury said.

As Hue provided effective evidence to show that she was not an accomplice of Fu’s, police had not imposed any criminal treatment on her, the court said.

Many similar cases have happened in Vietnam over the past few years. One of the most recent cases was uncovered in Ho Chi Minh City on July 14, when police arrested 13 Chinese and 13 Taiwanese in District 2, and seized telecom equipment. These swindlers admitted to police that they, under the direction of a Taiwanese man, had posed as bank employees and called their potential victims, who are also Chinese and Taiwanese,  telling them they had become VIP customers at their banks, which would eventually cost them in fees. The con artists then suggested their victims use an ATM machine to refuse VIP membership and avoid the fees. While their victims visited an ATM machine, a certain amount would be deducted from their bank accounts and transferred to the ring’s secret account. The detainees said their Taiwanese boss paid each of them NT$5,000-6,000 (US$167-200) per month for the scheme.

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