(Dan Tri) - After becoming one of three people in the world to receive a full scholarship to a university in Singapore, Nam and two other people began building a "trap" to scam thousands of people.
"Only rich people have free time, free time to sit and count money."
The above statement was made by Mr Pips - Pho Duc Nam - in a clip posted in August 2024, on the TikTok channel teaching how to get rich, making money from foreign exchange and stock exchanges. Two months later, Nam was arrested.
Instead of sitting on the hood of a luxury car or a billion-dollar apartment, Nam now sits in a detention cell, while his money, gold, and assets are being "counted" by the authorities.
"The machine" of Nam
Pho Duc Nam was born in 1994, in Ward 8, Vung Tau City, Ba Ria - Vung Tau Province. After graduating from high school, Pho Duc Nam was one of three people in the world to receive a full scholarship to a university in Singapore, majoring in information technology.
Nam is fluent in English and has an IELTS certificate of 8.5. At the age of 27, Nam cooperated with Le Khac Ngo (then 31 years old, living in Bac Tu Liem district, Hanoi) and a Turkish subject to start building a sophisticated, perfect "trap".
At that time, Nam, Ngo and the foreign subject directed 7 other subjects in Vietnam to establish many "ghost" companies as "fronts" to recruit employees to operate in the fields of foreign exchange and derivative securities trading.
In a short time, Nam's apparatus had about 1,000 employees, working from 8am to 9pm every day. The subjects created and managed 5 websites with English interfaces to make participants misunderstand that they were trading on international, reputable exchanges, creating trust for investors.
Nam's TikTok page (Photo: Screenshot).
Hanoi police said that these websites have been programmed and linked to the bank accounts of the management subjects; each trading floor is connected to the MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 applications, which are popular foreign exchange and stock trading platforms in the world today.
To commit fraud, the subjects hide under the names of companies and websites operating in the fields of Tele Marketing, Tele Sales, financial investment consulting, stock brokerage... to lure and entice customers to participate.
Nam's organization is decentralized, with many departments such as: Accounting, human resources, IT department, business and customer care department...
Departments in the company carry out independent activities, complement each other, and contact customers through social networks such as Zalo, Telegram... to commit fraud and property appropriation.
The trick of the subjects is to provide false information to make customers trust and transfer money to the accounts designated by the subjects.
Pho Duc Nam when arrested (Photo: TA).
Customers will be taken to private chat groups, guided, advised to "hit" buy and sell orders, stimulate deposits, use "leverage" (borrow) to "burn" the prey's account. Before letting the victim "burn", they drop "cheese" which are transactions with real profits, but little money, to fascinate, stimulate and "go all in".
Not stopping there, when the customer ran out of money, the subjects provided false information to make the investor trust and transfer more money to "recover". When the customer no longer had the financial capacity, the subjects blocked communication and appropriated all the money that the customer had transferred.
By December 2024, more than 2,600 people were identified by authorities as victims of property appropriation, with a total initial deposit of approximately $50 million.
When wealth is "exposed"
To attract more "prey", Mr Pips and Mr Hunter take full advantage of social networks TikTok and Facebook. These two subjects often post clips sharing investment experiences, ways to make money, and teaching how to get rich.
In order to prove that his investment activities bring high interest rates, Nam shows off his money, supercars, and shares about his "high-class", luxurious, and wealthy life. In the clips, Mr. Pips always says that these assets are all obtained from investments, thereby calling on people to join his system.
Mr Pips gradually became a youth idol, an "idol" in getting rich and doing financial business.
Mr Pips' Rolls-Royce (Photo: Hai Nam).
BNL (22 years old, from Quang Ninh, FPT University student) is one of the people who "fell into the trap" from Nam's clips above.
According to the report, through researching on Facebook and TikTok, L. learned that Pho Duc Nam was an expert in stock investment, regularly posting videos and pictures of supercars, watches and expensive houses. L. arose with the desire to be like Nam.
Around the beginning of June, L. texted Pho Duc Nam via Facebook to make friends and get to know him in order to learn about the exchanges Nam was investing in. Pho Duc Nam introduced L. to investing in stocks through an exchange called JPexchange.com and instructed the male student to buy stocks such as NVIDIA, NOVELIS, XAUUSD, XAGUSD, WTI...
After that, L. made a total of 37 transactions transferring money from his personal account to Pho Duc Nam's stock exchange, after which his account was "burned". The total amount of money L. was defrauded of was 8 billion VND.
When arrested, the above assets were temporarily seized and frozen by the investigation agency, causing a stir in public opinion due to the huge value of the assets of "super fraudster" Mr Pips.
Pho Duc Nam's super cars (Photo: Hai Nam).
Specifically, during the investigation, authorities seized and froze 316 billion VND in accounts, bonds worth 9 billion VND, savings books worth more than 200 billion VND; 69 billion VND, 2.3 million USD; 890 SJC gold bars; 246 kg of solid gold; 31 supercars, 7 luxury motorbikes, 59 famous brand watches, worth about 300 billion VND; 84 pieces of gold jewelry, inlaid with diamonds... In addition, authorities have frozen transactions on 125 real estates.
At the end of December, Hanoi police continued to detain another Mercedes car, 12 billion VND in accounts, 18 apartments, real estate worth about 100 billion VND, and collected an additional 500,000 USD in Nam's bank account in Singapore.
The total value of assets seized by Hanoi police is about 5,300 billion VND.
At a press conference of the Ministry of Public Security, Major General Nguyen Thanh Tung, Deputy Director of Hanoi Police, said that many other assets of Mr. Pips and his accomplices hidden abroad have been discovered. In the coming time, Hanoi Police will coordinate with the Supreme People's Procuracy to request judicial assistance abroad to completely recover the assets.
Source: https://dantri.com.vn/phap-luat/mr-pips-va-nhung-cu-lua-day-lam-giau-20250130234017950.htm
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