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Accordingly, the local police of all districts and Thu Duc City must receive reports from students’ parents for any phone scams with the content “children being in emergency surgery” and take specific statements of victims. The police have to cooperate with schools and the HCMC Department of Education and Training to distribute warnings to parents to stop being tricked.
The Criminal Police Division (PC02) under HCMC Public Security Department is working with other police divisions and the local police of 21 districts, Thu Duc City to trace all phone numbers contacting the victims and all suspected bank accounts receiving money from these victims.
Phone scammers have lately pretended to be teachers or school employees and called students’ parents to notify that their children had tripped and must be hospitalized for emergency surgery. They then asked for money transfer to a certain bank account to perform that surgery.
PC02 warns that when receiving such calls, parents must immediately try to verify the information via hotlines of their children’s school or the personal number of the head teachers, school supervisors. Parents should keep calm and avoid depositing money to an unknown bank account.
PC02 added that recently, cybercrimes have increased significantly, using more cunning tricks. They have used phone numbers from other countries, and the given bank accounts are mostly bought for scamming purposes. Since the fraudulent money is quickly transferred to other accounts, it is rather challenging to trace them.
Therefore, HCMC Public Security Department proposed that the State Bank of Vietnam devise feasible ways to control account opening, which is now quite simple to do and has been taken advantage by criminals.
Besides the warning of being careful answering calls from strange numbers, if receiving a call with the above trick, parents are instructed to contact the nearest police station or the hotline of HCMC Public Security Department at 069.3187.344, the hotline of the Criminal Police Division at 069.3187.200 to cooperate with the police.
