123 people arrested for orchestrating fake land sales

A few days later, on Monday, they began an investigation into Nguyen Van An, 27, general director of Loc Phuc, a company with its head office in HCMC's Tan Binh District, and dozens of his employees, for fraud.

On Thursday hundreds of officers raided a ceremony in the province’s Trang Bom District, where the company was reportedly organizing a fake sale of lands that did not exist.

They had received complaints from the public that Loc Phuc company was trying to sell non-existent property projects.

After the company transported dozens of unsuspecting customers to the sale in An Vien Commune, the police arrived to see An, his 122 employees and around 20 actors pretending to fight over the purchase of land plots.

A police team subsequently raided the headquarters of Loc Phuc in HCMC, and seized several documents, computers, cars, electrical devices, and cash in various currencies.

At the police station, some of the arrested employees confessed that the firm had hired around 100 students since June 2022 and instructed them to go online to find attractive-looking houses in HCMC. Then they would take photos and upload them on the firm's and other websites to attract buyers, they said.

When people contacted them and asked to buy the houses, the firm would drive them to the neighboring province of Dong Nai, where the actors would pretend to get into a scramble to buy properties in various projects and also persuade the victims to buy land plots.

The company's employees would then try to sell projects at inflated prices.

If any of the victims tried to complain afterward, the employees would simply cut their contact by discarding the fake SIM cards they had been using, the employees told the police.

Vo Nhat Hong Phuc, head of the criminal police division of the Dong Nai police department, said An's firm had earned around VND20 billion ($830,394) a month through this deception.