It is estimated that there are over 70 million internet users in Vietnam. At present, when Vietnam is speeding up the digital transformation process, certain people make corrupt use of the IT boom and the utilities IT brings to commit online scams and appropriate valuable assets.
In order to conduct online scams, bad people applied various methods to obtain victims’ confidence and appropriate assets. There are three major categories of scams, namely brand counterfeiting which accounted for 72.6 percent of total number of scams, online account appropriation (11.4 percent) and other types (16 percent), including romance scams and scams via lending apps.
“Their final goal is appropriating victims’ assets and the common way is making corrupt use of people’s credulity, the lack of information, unemployment and low incomes. In general, they hit the greed hidden in every person,” AIS said.
There were 16 types of scams recognized in 2022.
Scammers counterfeited the brands of well-known institutions such as commercial banks, state agencies, financial and securities companies and sent fraudulent SMS texts to victims. They also forged authentic websites/blogs to swindle victims and collect personal information.
They hijacked the use of social network accounts such as Zalo, Facebook and Tiktok to send fraudulent messages to friends and relatives in order to hijack accounts, steal information, appropriate properties, and smear the good reputation of victims and blackmail them.
Apps and ads about black credit appeared in various websites and they were sent en masse via emails, SMS and social networks. Victims then became debtors though they themselves did not know about this.
The combined types of scams mostly used by bad people used telephone numbers, introducing themselves as state agencies, police and telecom carriers, and calling victims, informing them that the victims violated the law and required them to transfer money to specific accounts to pay fines. Also, they used telephone numbers with strange prefixes to call victims, and the victims would lose money in their accounts.
They impersonated businesses and large local and foreign e-commerce websites to trick victims into collaborators. They spread false information, called for charity and appropriated properties.
In many cases, they trapped victims to access malicious links.
Other methods included tricking victims into using services; making the corrupt use of people’s pity to scam via Facebook, Zalo, Tinder and Telegram; swindling people out of phone numbers to get information of their accounts and properties.
