A court in Vietnam has sentenced a 21-year-old woman to nine years in prison for kidnapping two little girls and forcing them to make porn under the direction of her foreign boyfriend.  

At a closed-door trial held on Wednesday, the Juvenile and Family Court under the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court found Pham Huynh Nhat Vi guilty of two charges including ‘employment of a person under 16 for pornographic purposes’ and ‘abduction of a person under 16,’ as prescribed by the Vietnamese Penal Code.

Vi, originally from Tien Giang Province but a current resident of Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Binh District, received three and a half years for the former offense and five and a half years for the latter, equaling a total of nine years behind bars.   

The victims were seven-year-old N.K.T.M. and three-year-old L.H.T.L., whose mother is Nguyen Thi Chi, 27, a resident in the city’s District 7.

Regarding civil liability, the trial panel ordered the defendant to pay VND80 million (US$3,170) in compensation to the two girls.

According to the indictment, Vi met an individual named Richard from the U.S. on a dating app in October 2023.

In November 2023, Richard visited Vi in Vietnam and the two stayed together at a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. 

After leaving Vietnam, Richard convinced Vi to find girls aged six to 12 and film them performing sexual acts.

He promised to pay her in exchange for videos of the girls.

In March 2024, Richard sent Vi US$500 and promised he would rent an apartment for her once she found the girls she could force to have sex for filming.

On April 3, Vi found two girls named M. and L. sitting unattended on the sidewalk along Dong Khoi Street in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. 

She offered each VND10,000 ($0.4) and took them to eat ice cream and fried chicken.

Vi then sent photos of the girls to Richard, who asked her to take them to the Saigon Pearl apartment complex in Binh Thanh District where he had rented an apartment through an online app.

During her stay with the two girls at the apartment from April 3 to 7, Vi shot 12 sexually explicit video clips and sent them to Richard.

On April 3, the mother of the two girls reported their disappearance to police in Ben Nghe Ward, District 1.

Police officers later mobilized over 200 officers to search for the children.

Through an investigation and with public assistance, local police tracked Vi and the children to the apartment at Saigon Pearl.

Vi was taken into custody, where she admitted to abducting the two girls and filming them in lewd acts.

The Ho Chi Minh City police department has requested that the Supreme People’s Procuracy seek assistance from the U.S. Justice Department to investigate Richard’s involvement in the case and collect his statements.

Richard’s involvement is currently being treated as a separate case.

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