Fraudulent tricks cause woman in Nghe An to lose 162 million VND

Thanh Chuong District Police Department is detaining suspect Le The Hoang (born in 1995, residing in village 7, Quang Minh commune, Sam Son city, Thanh Hoa province) for the crime of fraud and appropriation of property.

At the police station, Le The Hoang confessed to all his actions. Although he only finished high school, Le The Hoang is very knowledgeable about information technology. Because he has no job and is addicted to online games, Le The Hoang is often short of money.

Defendant Le The Hoang. Photo: Bao Nguyen

Around September 2019, Le The Hoang participated in an online game called KenVip with an account nicknamed “Audi2018”. The form and rules of the game are as follows: When logging into the game, players must deposit money into their registered account by depositing through phone scratch cards and converting it into virtual currency in the game called Ken. During the game, players can convert Ken money back into phone scratch cards and then convert it into cash.

While playing the game, Le The Hoang discovered that there was an account with the nickname "baola2018" on the game system that had a large amount of Ken money, so he had the idea of ​​tricking this account owner to take over the account and the Ken money in the game.

Le The Hoang took the initiative to text, get acquainted and solicit the purchase of the account "baola2018" and Mr. L. - the owner of this account provided his phone number. After that, both of them negotiated and reached an agreement, Mr. L. sold the account "baola2018" to Le The Hoang for 62 million VND and Hoang would transfer the money to the bank account of Ms. D., Mr. L's friend.

With his cunning nature, Hoang went to the website smslobal.com to fake the message code to “redapple” and in turn faked the message code by entering the phone number 0986…37 of the bank account owner, which was Ms. D. - Mr. L's friend.

However, Ms. D. did not have a VietinBank account as Hoang requested, so Ms. D. asked Mr. Ch. (a friend of Ms. D.) to send her bank account number to see if she had received the money. Because he believed that the above message from Le The Hoang was real, Mr. Ch. informed Ms. D. that he had received 62 million VND. Therefore, Ms. D. transferred the above amount to Mr. L., and Mr. L. transferred it to Hoang to convert it into Ken money.

After tricking Mr. L. and having the username and password of the account “baola2018”, Le The Hoang spent all of Ken’s money in the game. With the same method and trick, he continued to trick Ms. D. twice with the amount of 100 million VND. The total amount of money that Le The Hoang defrauded and appropriated from Ms. Le Thi D. was 162 million VND.

In addition, Hoang also frequently uses high technology to appropriate assets in the game accounts of gamblers. The appropriated money is used for online gambling or converted into cash for profit. It is known that in 2015, Le The Hoang was sentenced to 18 months in prison by the People's Court of Chi Linh district, Hai Duong province for fraud and appropriation of property.

Previously, in early September 2019, Thanh Chuong District Police received a complaint from Ms. Le Thi D. (born in 1993), residing in Hanh Lam Commune, Thanh Chuong District. Accordingly, Ms. D. was scammed by a stranger using text messages and had her property stolen online for 162 million VND.

After investigation, on September 6, 2019, at a house on Ly Tu Trong Street, Thach Thang Ward, Hai Chau District, Da Nang City, Thanh Chuong District Police coordinated with the Criminal Police Department of Nghe An Provincial Police to successfully arrest Le The Hoang.

This is the house that Hoang rented to use as a place to use computers and smartphones connected to the internet to serve his criminal activities. Conducting an emergency search of the subject's residence, the Task Force seized 2 computers, 4 mobile phones, 2 bank account cards, 10 SIM cards of various types and a number of electronic devices.