Things to do to avoid being scammed on social media

Fraud methods, tricks and signs to recognize

Through verification, the masterminds of the fraud and property appropriation cases via social networks are mostly foreigners who illegally immigrated to Vietnam or settled in some Southeast Asian countries. From there, they colluded with Vietnamese people, mainly women living in Ho Chi Minh City to form an active group. According to the investigation, there are currently dozens, even hundreds of high-tech criminal groups operating actively in and outside the province.

To successfully “set a trap”, the mastermind often registers accounts on social networking sites such as Facebook, Zalo, Skype… then posts images pretending to be wealthy businessmen living in the UK, the US or soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, Syria. From there, they get to know each other, make friends, promise to marry or sponsor their trip abroad to build feelings. Then they offer to send the victims valuable gift boxes containing a lot of money and gold to buy a house in Vietnam, do charity work or give many reasons such as the family of a victim needs help, offer to give gifts, borrow money to invest in business…

Next, a woman in the criminal group will pretend to be a delivery person, customs officer, tax officer... to inform that the gift box is being detained because it contains a lot of foreign currency and valuable goods. From there, the victim is required to pay taxes and fees to receive the goods through the bank account number they provide.

The high-tech criminals arrested on January 3, 2018 include: Sylvester Zazy Nlemonwu (35 years old, residing at apartment A18-12, apartment building 12 View Tin Phong, Tan Thoi Nhat ward, district 12, Ho Chi Minh City; nationality: Nigeria), Dinh Thi Thu Thuy (26 years old; residing in An Nhon town, Binh Dinh province) and Le Thi Mai Tram (24 years old, residing in Binh Thanh district, Ho Chi Minh City). Photo: document.

In addition, many high-tech criminal groups also use sophisticated tricks to defraud people of lottery numbers with high winning potential, impersonating police officers to intimidate people and then demanding money transfers to... run cases or hacking personal social network passwords to defraud victims' relatives into recharging phone cards, transferring money...

To gain the trust of victims, criminal gangs often forge official documents, papers, even arrest warrants from the police or international shipping invoices. Therefore, people need to be vigilant with the information they receive.

Preventive measures

According to the investigation of the authorities, in order to open many bank cards, bad guys often go to motels and pawnshops to buy back the identity cards that customers have forgotten, then use their own pictures to paste on them to go to banks to register to open accounts. The accounts opened with these fake identity cards are used for the victims to deposit money.

In some cases, bad guys often pretend that they have lost their ID cards and ask some people to open a bank account for them and then pay an amount of 1 to 2 million VND to the person who opened the account. Then use these accounts to commit crimes.

Therefore, people absolutely do not provide their private phone numbers, account numbers, credit cards, or personal information to anyone. In particular, do not register, transfer accounts, or receive money for anyone.

Along with that, when setting a Facebook password, you should avoid using personal information such as birthdays, full names... because criminals often carefully study the above information of users and hack passwords. Or use the user's images to create a similar account.

Therefore, people need to be careful when sharing personal information and images on social networks. Internet and telecommunication network users need to be very careful when making friends online as well as money transfers, to avoid becoming prey for scammers.

When receiving suspicious calls, people must remain calm and not follow requests to transfer money or follow instructions to press numbers on the phone.

Facebook page of the Criminal Police Department of Nghe An Province Police.

Currently, to disseminate more knowledge about the law, the Criminal Police Department of Nghe An Province Police has its own Facebook page with a lot of useful information to help people improve their knowledge about the law. For any suspicions or discovery of related subjects or cases, people can contact via the above Facebook page or directly and promptly notify the nearest police unit.