Lost nearly 200 million VND because of applying to be an online collaborator

Recently, many people, mainly women who stay at home to do housework, do not have stable jobs, are taking care of young children... because they believe in advertisements recruiting online collaborators to record, read texts, novels... earning 200,000 - 500,000 VND/day, have been trapped with tens, even hundreds of millions of VND.

Received "job", lost 200 million VND before receiving salary

Ms. MKA (in Hanoi) said that around mid-June, she read information on Facebook looking for people to record, read texts, and read novels with an income of 200,000 - 500,000 VND/day, so she submitted an application to a Facebook page "Candidate to Read Stories, Novels" belonging to GMC Media Communication and Advertising Company Limited located at 354/114 Phan Van Tri, Ward 11, Binh Thanh District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

During the exchange on messenger, the recruiting unit sent the candidate code and asked Ms. A. to make friends on Zalo with the Human Resources Department with phone number 0762075598. After a short interview, the consultant suggested that she make friends on Zalo, then move to the Telegram group for convenient work exchange.

According to Ms. A., after trying to record a reading, she was informed that she had completed task 1 with an approval score of 90/100.

At job 2, the consultant asked her to place an order to buy any product according to the sponsor's request (MCRIO). Just transfer the money to buy the product, after 5-10 minutes, the money will be refunded plus 10% commission. If you agree, you can be considered to become an official employee of the company.

“In job 2, I transferred money to buy a microphone product worth 799,000 (the transfer order was HTG1 and they refunded the money including the commission of 878,900. At the end of job 2, they asked to contact Assistant Phan Anh Quan to continue reviewing to become an official employee with 4 activities in challenge 2” - Ms. MKA said.

According to Ms. A., because the purchase amount in job 2 was only a few hundred thousand dong, she did not think much and transferred the money immediately. In the next 4 activities, it was still a "purchase" job, but the amount of money gradually increased, and the commission also increased from 10-20%, so players easily "give rise to greed".

Ms. A. said: "In the second purchase transaction, I transferred 2 million VND to buy goods, 5 minutes later I received 2.2 million VND back. However, in the next transaction, after transferring 4 million VND with the content "Job2", I was notified that the transaction failed. Because I transferred the wrong amount of money, they asked me to transfer 4x3=12 million VND to get the above amount back. Because I regretted the money transferred wrongly and it was stuck on the system, I transferred 12 million VND but still did not receive that amount back" - Ms. A. said.

According to Ms. A, they used confusing words and added more work, because the amount of money invested was quite large, so people like her just wanted to quickly finish this job to withdraw the money. Having no money, she borrowed from relatives around her, from 30 to 70 million VND,... and only after transferring 200 million VND to them within more than 4 hours with the same trick as above, did Ms. KA really wake up.

“When I realized I had been scammed, I wanted to end the business and get my money back, but they challenged me. Even when I texted them to inform them that I had reported the matter to the police, they were not afraid and spoke rudely to me,” Ms. A. said.

Many victims were scammed

Not only Ms. A., for many months now, on a voice recording group on Facebook, people have also shared that they have been scammed with similar tricks. Some people get a few million, some get a lot, tens or even hundreds of millions. Their tricks are extremely sophisticated, they use images of influential people on social media to trick players into participating.

According to Ms. MKA, she was scammed because their recruitment page used a video of Tue Nga - a little girl with a strange face, famous for reviewing books on Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. Tue Nga used to be a participant in the program "7th Wish" on VTV3.

When we contacted Tue Nga about this, Tue Nga also said that she was very upset and had made a correction on social media platforms.

“This is the case where they used my image to scam. They used my image to take advantage of other people's trust for their own gain. Many people have messaged me, responding that they were scammed of a lot of money just because they trusted me. I am very upset, and if anyone sees content like this, you can comment to help me "warn me that it is a scam". My image was only posted in 2 places: Tue Nga on Tiktok and Tue Nga on Facebook" - Tue Nga said.

Experts warn

Having been following this issue for a while, cyber security expert Ngo Minh Hieu, National Cyber ​​Security Monitoring Center (Ministry of Information and Communications), said that this is essentially a form of online collaborator recruitment scam, only different in content. Instead of fraudulent recruitment for sales jobs for e-commerce platforms, now scammers have switched to recruiting recording, reading stories... The method of luring from Facebook to Zalo and Telegram and the tasks of transferring money to buy products and receiving commissions are all the same.

Social media users, especially women, need to be wary of online job offers that promise high incomes without requiring experience or skills. Often, bad guys will approach and introduce simple online jobs, only asking for a small amount of money to "perform the task" and then they will return the money with interest.

According to expert Ngo Minh Hieu, at first, the "tasks" can be easy and the scammers will quickly refund the money for performing the task along with the reward to build trust. However, later, they will ask the victim to perform "tasks" with larger amounts of money and find reasons such as the "collaborator" is slow or makes mistakes during the work process, does not meet the credit rating requirements...

“At that time, the scammer will keep that amount of money and ask the victim to transfer a larger amount to receive the entire invested amount. This scam continues in a cycle, until the victim discovers that they have been scammed or is no longer able to pay. At that time, the bad guys will block all communication and disappear. The means of communication they often use is the messaging application Telegram, which can automatically delete all history from both sides after the scam occurs, leaving no evidence and making it difficult to trace the account,” said expert Hieu.

Mr. Ngo Minh Hieu warned that scammers often use media and communication channels without leaving personal information or using fake information. This makes it very difficult to determine their identity and location. Scammers often use technology and multinational networks to carry out their activities. They can use anonymous servers, proxy services, VPNs and encryption methods to hide their real IP addresses and locations. This makes it difficult for investigators to track and trace, especially when the subject is operating abroad.

Communication channels through apps like Telegram can automatically delete all message history after a certain period of time. This makes it difficult for investigators to collect evidence and trace the activities of scammers. Since online scams are often multinational in nature, cooperation between investigative agencies and governments of different countries is necessary. However, limited cooperation and information sharing between countries can delay the process of tracking down and arresting scammers.

According to expert Hieu, the number of online fraud cases is increasing and the investigation agency often has to deal with many different types of crimes. This puts pressure on the resources and priorities of the investigation agency, making it more difficult to investigate and track down the fraudsters. And recovering the money is almost impossible. Because the individuals or groups behind these scams often operate under fake identities or use sophisticated techniques to hide their tracks. They may not be easily traced, making it difficult to identify and locate them. Not to mention the subjects also use virtual bank accounts, or bank accounts purchased from others - through groups buying and selling bank accounts on Telegram.

According to VOV