VietNamNet Bridge – The Hanoi People’s Court yesterday, July 11, opened a trial for two Chinese men, Zhong Tielin and Yang Faqing, who last year sold fake gold antiques and gold ingots to several people, including a lawyer.

Zhong, 41, was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment and Faqing got 17 and a half years for charges of “swindling to appropriate assets,” the court said.

The case also involved another Chinese man, A Ling, but the court said that Ling’s role in the case needed to be further clarified and that he might be tried later.

The court ordered the two men to return US$100,000 to Vi To Nam, a resident of central Da Nang City, who was swindled by them in July 2011.

According to the indictment, Zhong, Yang, and A Ling came to Vietnam last year. Ling later sought antique lovers for his partners to deal with in their scams.

On October 17, 2011 Ling contacted Do Thai Han, 35, the head of a law office in Hanoi's Cau Giay District, via the internet, and said that while working on a construction site in Vietnam, he and his colleagues had found an ancient terracotta pot with dozens of boat-shaped gold bars and gold statues of Maitreya Buddha.

Ling said his group wanted to sell these items in Vietnam, and Han agreed to deal with them.

The next morning, Zhong and Yang came to Han’s office with 10 gold bars and three statues.

They used a saw to cut one of the bars. They then switched the cut pieces with real pieces of gold they had in their pockets and handed them to Hung, as they later confessed to the police.

After a jeweler certified it as real gold, Hung believed it was legitimate and accepted their offer to sell the entire treasure, consisting of 38 gold bars and three statues, for 800,000 yuan (US$125,000).

On October 20 he handed over the money but found some scratches on one of the gold bars that revealed silver underneath. Realizing he had been conned, he secretly called the local police, who quickly came and seized the two.

The statues and ingots were later found to consist of bronze, zinc and aluminum.

The swindlers confessed that with the same tricks, they had successfully deceived Nam to the tune of $100,000 in July 2011.

The police discovered that the two men were from Jiangxi Province in southeastern China, and one of them belonged to a group of professional swindlers.

VietNamNet/Tuoi Tre