by Việt Dũng

Over the last few months many young people including university students around the country have fallen for a rather clever albeit bizarre scam: “online” kidnapping.

One recent case involved a woman in HCM City getting a call on July 25 about how her 18-year-old daughter had been kidnapped and would be sold to Cambodia, a sadly regular crime committed by human traffickers.

The woman paid a ransom of VNĐ10 million before informing the police, who then swung into action and quickly found out that the daughter was “being held” at a neighbourhood hotel. By herself!

The girl told the police she had been contacted by someone posing as a police officer and warned she was culpable in a money laundering case.

She was instructed to stay in a hotel room alone, keep this "investigation" a secret from her family, prove her financial capability by having her mother wire the money and lying to her that it was for applications to study abroad.

She was also told to turn off her phone if her mother became suspicious, all while being badgered and worn down.

Thus this is how the scam unfolds: victims were threatened with official action by someone looking like an authority figure, and told to get money from their family using some pretext and “deposit” it in a bank.

They were told to hole up in a hotel and totally cut themselves off from the outside world including their families until the original problem was sorted out.

Needless to say, once the money came into their account, the scammers got their hands on it and disappeared.

There is no doubt the poor girl went through a harrowing and traumatising experience. She was so panic-stricken that she just followed what an apparently angry man barked at her.

You can’t but have sneaking admiration for these “online" kidnappers, who, without violence or criminal threats, hoodwink people with nothing more than police uniforms and an authoritative look, get them to lie to their families that they need money and hide themselves away.

Some even instructed the victims to film themselves being “kidnapped” and begging for help while they made threats through the phone so that the families believed they were being held hostage.

However, I’m willing to bet some people are thinking: “Wait, what? Why are they falling for this scam? Why aren’t they asking questions?”

I am one of them.

Scam calls targeting gullible people are not rare in Việt Nam. Even reporters like me and my colleagues have gotten calls from strangers saying we have received a suspicious package or are involved in a money laundering investigation.

It is not hard to understand why some people fall prey considering the scammers somehow have our real names and addresses.

Reports about these crimes appear frequently in the media and social websites.

A story about someone getting scammed out of millions of đồng would make the headline, and, as if scripted, comments would follow on the article or on social media saying how it is “an obvious scam” and “Why are they falling for this in 2023/2024/2025?”

The daughter in the above case said while she often used social media, it was mostly for entertainment and she rarely checked the news, and so she did not know about this online kidnapping scam targeting young people.

Indeed, many young people just don’t keep up with the news. They might know about really big events happening around them, but not the mundane, small-time crooked stuff.

And their families have had to pay for a very expensive lesson.

Since March there have been around five such scams every month in HCM City alone involving billions of đồng. Other localities too have been hit.

Experts point to the fact that young victims are chosen because they lack experience in life but know to a reasonable extent how the cyber world works.

Thus, when these scammers in police uniforms and badges provide their exact personal information, they begin to wonder if they had indeed accidentally committed some crime online.

My young friend Nguyễn Gia Linh told me that her friend once received such a scam call. While they were pretty sure it was a conman, the fact that he yelled angrily and gave orders brusquely shook them a bit.

“Many of the victims are also from the countryside with little knowledge about such sophisticated scams, and so one can understand why they fall for them.”

Lieutenant Colonel Lê Duy Sâm, deputy head of the criminal police department at the HCM City Police, said: “Police departments, the Procuracy and courts never send notices or arrest warrants through mobile apps.”

Information on how the police would contact people for an investigation is available on official websites and social media channels, he added.

But then it takes a few scams and knowledge about them to get around before anyone would even think about looking all this up.

Scammers are nothing if not inventive and constantly come up with new cons, meaning even if someone knows about one or a few scams they can see through others.

While the responsibility does fall on the public to educate themselves, the mass media has a role to play in informing them.

Vietnamese television series and films have indeed taken up issues like human trafficking, revenge porn and other crimes.

So the next time you hear a person explaining how they were tricked by an “obvious” scam, be mindful and spread the word to people around you.

After all, who ever thinks they will fall victim to a scam – until they do. VNS