Vietnam busts China, Taiwan fake police scam

HANOI (AFP) - Vietnamese state media said on Friday that authorities had busted an elaborate telephone scam in which victims in China 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 China 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 China 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 top city policeman, told the Tuoi Tre newspaper.