Nghe An police entered Quang Tri to arrest a subject who created 40 fake bank websites and defrauded hundreds of millions.

On July 22, the Nghi Loc District Police Investigation Agency initiated a case, prosecuted the accused and issued a 3-month detention order for Nguyen Minh Tuan (born in 1999), residing in Hai Phu commune, Hai Lang district, Quang Tri province, to investigate and clarify the act of using computer networks, telecommunications networks, and electronic means to commit property appropriation.

200 million VND in the account "disappeared"

Previously, on March 8, the Nghi Loc District Police Department received a report from Ms. Nguyen Thi Th. (born in 1987), residing in Boi Son Commune, Do Luong District, reporting: During the day, Ms. Th. went to deliver goods in Nghi Van Commune (Nghi Loc).

A friend asked Ms. Th. to use her bank account to receive 1.6 million VND transferred by a customer abroad. After Ms. Th. followed the instructions of the customer abroad who needed to transfer money, the 200 million VND in her bank account was lost.

After verifying the above information, the investigation agency realized that this was an online fraud case to appropriate a large amount of money and it was possible that Ms. Th. was not the only victim. Therefore, Nghi Loc District Police established Project 719L to investigate and clarify the matter.

Many fake bank websites have been set up. Illustration photo

During the investigation, the Task Force suspected that the perpetrator was currently in Quang Tri province. The unit sent a working group to this central province to continue screening and selecting the subject. After actively using professional measures, Task Force 719L had sufficient documents to prove that Nguyen Minh Tuan (born in 1999), residing in Hai Phu commune, Hai Lang district, Quang Tri province, was the perpetrator.

At 10:00 a.m. on July 14, the Task Force 719L coordinated with PC 01 (Quang Tri Provincial Police) to arrest Nguyen Minh Tuan at his home. During the search, the police seized a laptop, 2 mobile phones and 2 ATM cards. At the time of Tuan's arrest, the laptop he was using was storing thousands of fake bank messages with login links.

Sophisticated tricks

At the investigation agency, Nguyen Minh Tuan confessed to his crime. Accordingly, at the end of 2018, Tuan researched and registered an account on the service website Weebly.com, then created fake websites of banks in Vietnam and international money transfer services Western Union, Money gram with the purpose of using this website to send to online sellers.

The subject pretends to be Vietnamese but is studying or working abroad and wants to order products in large quantities and will pay for the purchase by transferring money through an account. The subject uses free Skype messages provided from abroad to send messages in Vietnamese format without accents similar to Western Union and MoneyGram money receiving messages (with transaction codes, account numbers and recipient banks based on the information the recipient sent to Tuan), with the content: “International bank is transferring money to your account, please confirm at the link below” with a fake bank website for the victim to access to enter information to complete the transaction.

At the same time, the subject uses the phone to call the victim, claiming to be a bank employee, instructing the victim to verify and enter information on the website sent to Tuan. If the victim trusts and confirms the information and enters the "OTP" code sent by the bank via phone number, the subject will immediately take over the Internet banking account and will transfer all the money in the victim's account to another account.

Subject Nguyen Minh Tuan. Photo: NT

With the above trick, Tuan created a Facebook account named Nguyen Minh Thu. Through this account, the subject learned that Ms. Lo Thi T. (born in 1990), residing in Dong Thanh commune, Yen Thanh district, sells smoking cessation drugs online. On March 6, Tuan tricked Ms. T. into thinking that he had ordered 3 boxes of smoking cessation drugs. The subject said he was in Russia and asked to transfer 950,000 VND to buy the drugs into Ms. T's account.

With the above trick, Tuan took over Ms. T's Internet banking account, but because the account had no money, he texted Ms. T. with the content: "Account has no transactions during the week so no money received”.

The next day, the subject texted Ms. T. to ask to borrow someone else's account to transfer money for medicine. Without any suspicion, Ms. T. borrowed the bank account number of Ms. Nguyen Thi Th. (born in 1987), residing in Boi Son commune, Do Luong. Ms. Th. also trusted Tuan, so she followed the instructions of the link created by the subject, as Ms. T. had done before.

At this time, Ms. Th.'s bank account also had no money, so Tuan used the phone number +84931924402 to call Ms. Th. and told her: "Network error, no money received”.

At around 10:00 a.m. on March 8, Ms. Th.'s account received a disbursement of 200 million VND from Agribank Do Luong branch. This amount of money was borrowed from Ms. Th.'s mother-in-law's account to receive loan disbursement from the bank. Because he had logged in once on Agribank's E-mobile banking application, Tuan received a notification and knew that Ms. Th.'s account had money in it. At around 11:40 a.m. the same day, Tuan continued to use Facebook Nguyen Minh Thu to message Facebook Lo Thi T. to ask to order more smoking cessation drugs, a total of 5 boxes for 1.6 million VND and asked Ms. T. to borrow Ms. Th.'s bank account number from the day before.

When Ms. T. asked to borrow her bank account number, Ms. Th. agreed and proceeded to confirm. After entering the code on the website, Ms. Th. waited a long time but still did not receive the money, so she thought it was an error like the previous time. At 4:00 p.m. the same day, Ms. Th. went to Agribank Do Luong branch to withdraw the bank's disbursement money for her mother-in-law, only then did she realize that she had been scammed. The amount of 200 million VND in her account had been transferred to other bank accounts. Fortunately, Agribank promptly blocked and temporarily retained 25 million VND and returned it to Ms. Th.

During the initial investigation, Nghi Loc District Police determined that Nguyen Minh Tuan had created and used more than 40 fake website domains of banks and money transfer services to commit fraud. Initially, the investigation agency determined that: In addition to Ms. Th, Nguyen Minh Tuan also defrauded many other people in localities across the country. The total amount of money that the subject had defrauded and appropriated was 375 million VND.

Currently, Project 719L is being further investigated. Nghi Loc District Police informs anyone who has been scammed as above to contact the investigation agency's investigators via phone number: 0989112789.