Arrested suspect of scamming people by texting to win prizes, stealing nearly 1 billion VND

To erase traces after defrauding the victims and avoid being tracked by the investigation agency, Pham Quoc Thinh threw 1 laptop, 1 phone, 5 junk SIM cards, and 3 ATM cards into the river.

Pham Quoc Thinh at the police station - Photo: DOAN CUONG

On the morning of October 17, the Economic Police Department, PC46, Da Nang City Police went to Dien Ban town, Quang Nam province, in coordination with local police to serve the decision to prosecute the accused, temporarily detain for 4 months and search the residence of Pham Quoc Thinh, 23 years old, residing in Vinh Dien ward, Dien Ban town.

Thinh was prosecuted for using computer networks, telecommunications networks, the Internet or digital devices to commit acts of property appropriation.

According to PC46, since June 2017, cyber detectives have discovered a number of individuals who regularly travel from Dien Ban to Da Nang and then to Hoi An using computer networks to appropriate property.

In August 2017, Colonel Tran Muu - Deputy Director of Da Nang Police - requested the establishment of a special task force with code name CNC 817 to fight.

Through investigation, PC46 determined that Thinh's method was to go online to buy domain names and hosting, then use an email account created at the website 10minutemail.net to register the domain names and hosting.

With a domain name and hosting, Thinh took the code to create many websites to post scam and winning news such as quatang2016.com, thangbanhanqua.com... Thinh researched and used Fplus software downloaded from the internet.

This software has the function of automatically searching, making friends on Facebook and automatically sending messages to your Facebook friends list.

The content of the message is usually a notification of winning a SH motorbike, a gift of 100 million VND, and 1 year of free gas.

In the winning message, Thinh used 10 junk phone numbers, using one of these 10 numbers every 10 days. When the victim calls this number or fills in the information, Thinh will contact them to notify them of winning the prize.

To receive the money transferred by the victims, Thinh and his friend went to Da Nang to meet Nguyen Van Muon, residing in Thanh Khe, Da Nang, to ask him to open an ATM card at Agribank for 1 million VND.

With this account number, from April 2015 to March 2017, Thinh defrauded 586 million VND. After that, Thinh abandoned and no longer used this account to erase the traces.

Then Thinh went to Da Nang twice to continue making ATM cards at Agribank and received more than 200 million VND in fraudulent money through this account...

The total amount of money that Thinh appropriated through 3 accounts was nearly 1 billion VND, the initial number of victims identified was more than 50 people. The amount of money that the subject appropriated was mainly used for personal expenses and going to nightclubs.

According to the police, Thinh used Agribank ATMs because he targeted people in rural and mountainous areas, with the most people scammed out of 30 million VND and the least out of 3 million VND.

Notably, Thinh continuously tried to erase his tracks to avoid police investigation. In July 2017, Thinh threw 1 laptop, 1 phone, 5 junk SIM cards, and 3 ATM cards into Vinh Dien River.

According to Tuoi Tre