Vietnam busts Chinese telephone scam

Vietnamese media Friday said authorities had busted an elaborate telephone scam in which victims in the Chinese mainland and Taiwan were tricked into handing over money by callers posing as police officers.

Police in Vietnam's southern city of Ho Chi Minh confirmed that 52 people, all from the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, were arrested on Thursday on suspicion of involvement in the fraud, without giving further detail.

The accused are believed to have called randomly-selected numbers in the mainland and Taiwan and pretended to be police officers and prosecutors to persuade victims to wire money to bank accounts they had access to, media reports said.

"Similar fraud groups often move between different countries and tend to stay only for a few months in each place to avoid police detection," Nguyen Sy Quang, a HCMC top policeman, told the Tuoi Tre newspaper.

"In Ho Chi Minh City, they were discovered and arrested right when they first started operating," he said, adding that the suspects had all entered Vietnam on tourist visas.

Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau has said previously that a number of fraud rings have relocated to Vietnam to avoid detection and arrest by local authorities.