Authorities detain lottery scheme organizer for defrauding over 100 billion VND.
After organizing and managing rotating savings schemes for some time, Le Thi Lai opened many more schemes and failed to balance her income and expenses, leading to losses and the misappropriation of over 100 billion VND.
On September 19th, the Investigation Police Department of Binh Thuan province served the decision to prosecute and executed the arrest warrant to detain Le Thi Lai (60 years old, residing in Ham Thuan Nam district, Binh Thuan province) for investigation into the crime of fraud and appropriation of property.
According to the investigation, since 2005, Le Thi Lai organized informal lending schemes with many people, mainly monthly schemes. Initially, the schemes proceeded normally; due to the small number of participants, Lai collected and paid out the money in full to the players. Trusting her, the number of people participating in her schemes increased steadily.
By 2017, based on the number of participants registered for the rotating savings scheme, Lai opened many more schemes simultaneously. However, this woman failed to balance the collection and payment of installments to the participants, leading to losses and inability to repay.
Following the verification and investigation of the citizens' complaints, the investigating agency determined that on November 5, 2020, Lai organized a rotating savings scheme (of the type with 1 million VND/month) for 937 participants, with a total of 19,043 shares.
After this rotating savings scheme had been operating for some time, even though no one wanted to sell their shares, Lai provided false information and then sold shares to 295 people, totaling 15,671 shares (each share worth 10 million VND), raking in over 156 billion VND.
On January 22, 2022, the rotating savings scheme matured. Lai used part of the money from the previous sale of the scheme to pay interest to some members and the final installment (the last payout) for 2020.
The remaining embezzled money was used by Lai to repay the principal and interest on newly opened and old rotating savings schemes from previous years, as well as loans resulting from losses and deficits.
Based on the cross-referencing documents, the investigating agency determined that, with the aforementioned rotating savings scheme opened on November 5th, Lai had defrauded 167 participants of a total of over 100 billion VND.
