Police in Ho Chi Minh City have busted a swindling ring and arrested two Taiwanese and two Vietnamese who had posed as authority figures to cheat their victims out of at least VND2.5 billion (US$118,000).

Chen Guo Liang, a Taiwanese, and two Vietnamese men, Tran Cong Thuan Hieu, 30, and Le Son Anh Bao, 25, were arrested at a tenement in District 8 on August 30 on charges of “appropriating property through swindling” and “forging seals and/or documents of agencies and/or organizations,” pursuant to Articles 239 and 267 of the Penal Code, police said.

On the same day, police also arrested another Taiwanese man, Liu Tsung Chih, the ring’s leader, at the Bizu 3 Hotel in District 7, where he had booked three rooms, on the same charges.

According to the case file, Hieu and Bao used fake ID cards to open 20 ATM accounts and then gave these ATM cards to Chen, who arrived in Vietnam two months ago. Chen paid Bao and Hieu VND6 million ($283) each per month. In addition, Chen paid the two a tip of VND500,000 ($23.5) or VND1 million ($47) each time they withdrew money from their accounts. Chen, Bao, and Hieu also managed to steal the personal information of a number of account holders at several Vietnamese banks, and then provided the stolen information to Liu, who hired others to swindle both Vietnamese and Chinese nationals. Liu’s crew posed as police officers, tax officials, customs officers, investigators, prosecutors, and other such authority figures from Vietnam and China and phoned the account holders whose information had been provided to Liu by Chen. During the phone calls, these imposters use different scenarios to cheat their potential victims, investigators said.

In some cases, the perpetrators told their victims that they had yet to pay a phone charge, and would have their communication line cut if they did not pay the amount to the designated accounts, which in fact were operated by Bao and Hieu. In another example, the ring’s victims were told that they were under investigation for money-laundering, and were asked to transfer the amounts in question to certain accounts for examination. Many victims followed the imposters’ instructions out of fear, and subsequently lost money.  By the time the ring was broken up, they had accrued about VND2.5 billion (US$118,000) in their accounts. Meanwhile, Liu paid Chen 20 percent of the amount transferred to Bao’s and Hieu’s accounts. While searching the three rooms rented by Liu at the hotel in District 7, police seized numerous telecommunication devices, as well as plans for ways to swindle people. Police are expanding their investigation to track down other members of the ring.