VietNamNet Bridge - Ho Chi Minh City police yesterday arrested 56 foreigners, most of them Asians, for swindling foreign individuals and businesses and used hi-tech devices to steal their bank account information.

At 15 p.m. Friday, with support from the Ministry of Public Security forces, policemen conducted raids at 3 apartments C25/10, C17/12 and D6/06 in the Hoang Anh Gia Lai III tenement in Phuoc Kieng commune, Nha Be District, and at 28 Road 9A, Him Lam residential area in Binh Chanh District.

At those locations, police caught 39 Asian foreigners, including 9 women, in the act of stealing information from individuals via Internet for swindling purposes.

From their declaration, police continued to arrest 17 more foreigners, including five women, for similar swindling acts at 793/51/8 Tran Xuan Soan Street in District 7.

All of the arrested were residing in the city without registering with authorities.

During the raids, the police seized 15 Internet radio transmitters and receivers, 56 walkie-talkies, 17 modem-routers, 17 laptops, 5 printers, 12 mobile phones, 82 landline telephone sets, and a lot of memory cards and software disks.

According to initial investigation, those foreigners came to Vietnam in various ways and then stayed in the city without registering their temporary residence with the authorities.

They installed hi-tech telecom equipment at their rented houses.

Some of the swindlers then posed as foreign post officers to make phone calls to phone subscribers in Asia countries to ask them to pay their telephone charge.

The swindlers later informed those subscribers that their telephone lines had been illegally used by unknown people and instructed them to report the problem to the authorities where they were living.

Through those contacts, they collected information related to their bank accounts and then broke into them to steal money.

In other cases, the swindlers posed as foreign authorities to warn foreign businesses that their bank accounts had been illegally used in relation to money laundering.

They then told their victims to withdraw all money in their account and transfer it into an account “designated by the authorities” for security reasons, but that account was actually was theirs.

According to Vietnam News Agency, swindlers also posed as foreign policemen, tax officials, customs officers to contact holders of bank accounts in foreign countries to steal bank account information and then broke into those accounts to appropriate their money.

All of their victims are foreigners, police said.

The police are investigating to trace down other members of the large-scale swindling organization and determine how much money the swindlers have stolen.

Source: Tuoi Tre