Vietnamese police are preparing to hand over to their Chinese counterparts  24 Chinese suspects who had arrived in Vietnam and posed as law enforcement officials to con their fellow countrymen in China out of their money. These suspects, including 21 men and three women, were arrested on Thursday in two houses in Ho Chi Minh City – one in District 5 and the other in District 11, the anti-high tech crime police department under the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security said on Friday. The police seized from these Chinese a dozen of laptops, tens of mobile phones, hundreds of SIM cards for phones, and a lot of telecommunications equipment.  The arrest was made following an investigation launched by Vietnamese police based on the information provided by their Chinese counterparts, who had detected signs of crime committed by a criminal ring operating outside China.  

This man is one of the 24 Chinese suspects arrested by Vietnamese police in Ho Chi Minh City on May 21, 2015. Photo: Tuoi Tre

According to investigators, after arriving in Vietnam, these suspects posed as police officers, court officials and prosecutors while contacting their fellow countrymen in China on the phone to cheat them. During such phone calls, the victims were told that they were under investigation for criminal acts related to suspicious amounts of money, and were asked to transfer the amounts in question to certain accounts for police probes. The swindlers promised their victims that those amounts would be returned to them in a short time if no signs of crime were detected.  One of these victims was a person in China’s Sangdong province, who had lost 7,000 Chinese yuan (US$1,130) to the cheaters after transferring the money to an account designated by them, investigators said.

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