Alleged traffickers arrested for selling women to China

Van Tuyet Mai, 40, Nguyen Thi Nho, 38 and Tran Quang Phat, 34, are currently in detention and being investigated for "human trafficking," police announced Tuesday.

Officers from the Ministry of Public Security and Dak Nong Province police in the Central Highlands had been surveilling the marriage brokering ring operating in Ho Chi Minh City and nearby localities.

Police said they have identified Mai as the leader of the group.

According to investigators, Mai is married to a Chinese man and lived in China. She often traveled between China and Vietnam.

Late last year, a Vietnamese woman in China asked Mai to find other women in Vietnam to sell to Chinese men as wives for commissions at VND200-300 million (US$8,176-12,264) per woman.

Mai agreed.

She returned to her home country and contracted Nho and Phat to entice uneducated, unemployed women from poor families in remote areas. Most of them were from Dak Nong Province.

Mai’s ring promised the women a brighter future in China along with a dowry of VND80-120 million.

After selecting the women, members of the ring organized "blind dates" for Chinese customers to meet face-to-face with the women in Vietnam, or online.

Any woman chosen by the Chinese men would be given passports, visas, health certificates, and other documents by the ring.

Only once they arrived in China did the women realize they had been tricked as they received no dowries and their handlers would confiscate their documents and mobile phones and not allow them to leave the homes of their new "families."

Anyone who wanted to return to Vietnam would have to pay the traffickers the same amount of money that the Chinese men had paid for them.

Police said that since at least May, Mai’s ring has sold tens of Vietnamese women to China. But some of them escaped and reported Mai when they made it back to Vietnam.

According to government data, in the first half of this year, 229 people were arrested in 88 cases of human trafficking that involved 224 victims, up from 55 cases and 154 victims over the same period last year.

The trafficking of women to China as brides is not rare given the high demand there.

According to a New York Times story in July, due to the Chinese government's one-child policy, which it ended in 2016, and a traditional cultural preference for boys, China has around 35 million more men than women, which has fueled a competition for brides.