Scammed out of 2.8 billion VND for participating in online voting

Mr. T reported the incident to the Criminal Police Department of the City Police Department.

On June 21, 2023, Mr. T received a call from a strange phone number. The caller introduced himself as working for Google Vietnam Company, specializing in voting for locations on Google Maps, and needed to recruit collaborators to work from home. Collaborators using smartphones with the Google Maps application must add Lotus Chat software between the company and the collaborator.

Next, a company coordinator contacted Mr. T to guide him to participate in the voting task. Initially, the company assigned Mr. T to the primary group to vote for 4 tourist destinations, then took a screenshot and sent it to the lotus chat group, then the company transferred the commission to his account.

Mr. T said, “I was suspicious and cautious because I knew through newspapers and radio that people had been scammed. But when I joined the Google Vietnam entertainment company, I saw how easy it was to make money. I didn’t do anything beyond my knowledge. I just poked around and got money.”

When he lost his guard, Mr. T was put into a telegram group by the subject to go to the next round. These subjects said that this was a more advanced stage 2. At this level, the job was still the same, but the subject forced Mr. T to pay money for each vote, increasing from a few hundred thousand to hundreds of millions of VND, and at the same time promised to pay a daily salary of 300 thousand VND and would refund the money when Mr. T finished participating in the programs.

By the time Mr. T had completed the task at level 4, the final level, and the amount of money he had transferred to the subject was more than 500 million VND, Mr. T eagerly waited to receive his money back along with the commission paid by the company.

However, Mr. T did not receive the money, but instead the subject enticed him to upgrade to a VIP card if he wanted to receive the money back, which meant that Mr. T had to transfer hundreds of millions of dong more. Then, after the transaction, the subject made many excuses such as having to pay income tax, value added tax... until there was no more money in the account, Mr. T realized that he had been scammed out of more than 2.8 billion dong, so he went to the police to report it.

It can be said that the scams on the internet are always sophisticated and constantly changing. Users only need to be a little careless and negligent to fall into the trap of the subject. Through the above incident, Tay Ninh Police recommends that people must raise their vigilance against invitations to participate in making money on social networking platform applications, need to carefully study the form of making money, clearly verify the information on the internet by directly contacting the hotline number of the business or social networking application; when working as a collaborator for any unit, you must meet directly with the authorized person to sign the contract; clearly check the job information, salary level and form, commission received...

Be especially vigilant with jobs that require money to invest, transfer money in advance; check and verify social network accounts, strange phone numbers inviting investment participation; do not provide images, personal information such as citizen identification, bank accounts... to strangers; do not access, log in to strange links, applications when the information is unclear; if you notice any suspicious signs, people need to immediately contact the nearest police agency for guidance, advice, to avoid being taken advantage of by bad guys, committing crimes.

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