Falling into the "Yody Gift" trap, 59-year-old woman lost more than 2 billion VND

On July 22, Da Huoai District Police ( Lam Dong ) said that they had just received a report from Ms. Nguyen Thi N (born in 1964, residing in Madaguoi town, Da Huoai district) about being scammed out of more than 2 billion VND through registering to receive gifts on social networks.

The victim was scammed through the "Yody Gift" program. Photo: Provided by the investigation agency

According to Ms. Nguyen Thi N, on July 8, she registered to participate in the summer gift program on Facebook. After registering, the “Yody Gift” page asked Ms. N to provide her phone number and address to receive the gift, and instructed her to create an account on Telegram to issue a “gift confirmation voucher”.

After being instructed to create a Telegram account, Ms. N received a “gift code” and a “gift confirmation voucher”. Next, the scammer asked Ms. N to send the “gift code” to a person named Ngoc Anh via Telegram. Ms. N was instructed by the person claiming to be the “Sales Director” to participate in helping the Yody fashion store system increase sales on e-commerce sites in order to receive gifts.

To receive money and attractive gifts, this person asked Ms. N to pay in advance 300,000 VND into a Nam A bank account named DOAN VAN CHI LINH with the promise that after completing the increase in sales, Ms. N would receive 360,000 VND and gifts worth from 500,000 to 2.5 million VND.

Seeing that the amount was not large, at around 7:00 p.m. on July 17, Ms. N transferred 300,000 VND to the scammer's account. An hour later, Ms. N received a photo of the scammer successfully transferring 360,000 VND to her. The "sales director" invited Ms. N to continue participating in event number 2 to receive 30% commission from this event, Ms. N had to pay 2.6 million VND.

From this point on, the victim was continuously drawn into the tricks of the group. The amount of money Ms. N transferred to them increased from several million to hundreds of millions of dong according to the value of the "commission" that would be received as promised by the scammers.

In particular, to exploit the victim's greed, the scammer created a huge amount of virtual money in Ms. N's account. However, to withdraw this money, the scammer set a condition that the victim must pay 10% of the total amount in the account.

Specifically, on the morning of July 18, the scammers announced that the amount Ms. N had withdrawn had reached more than 1.51 billion VND. The scammers asked Ms. N to pay 10% VAT and personal income tax, equivalent to 151 million VND. Thinking it was real, Ms. N transferred 151 million VND to the account provided by the scammers.

At noon on July 19, a person claiming to be the chief accountant sent Ms. N a photo with the content "System reminder! Refund failed". They asked Ms. N to pay another 300 million VND before the disbursement could be made. Ms. N asked for a reduction because she was unable to pay, but was given an extension until 3:30 p.m. the same day to pay the full 300 million VND.

Fearing the loss of the refunded amount of more than 1.6 billion VND, Ms. N had to borrow 300 million VND to transfer to DOAN VAN CHI LINH's account. During this time, the amount of money in the account that the scammers promised Ms. N would receive continued to increase exponentially because Ms. Nhi had achieved the VIP title, making the victim even more greedy.

The scammers' messages entice the victims to deposit more money to withdraw the virtual money in their accounts. Photo: Provided by the investigation agency

With a series of reasons given by the scammers, while the amount of money that Ms. N was promised to receive kept increasing every hour, the victim borrowed money from relatives many times and transferred a total of more than 2 billion VND to the scammers' account.

By the night of July 19, Ms. N could no longer contact the people in the above scam group. Realizing that she had been scammed, she went to the police to report it.

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