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Police officers only support activating electronic identification directly for people without instructions over the phone. |
According to the police’s warning, there has been a trick of falsely portraying oneself as a member of the police. Criminals called people saying that they would help people to install VNeID applications and activate electronic identification accounts but they installed fake VNeID applications to extort money from people.
Specifically, a resident in the Mekong Delta Province of Dong Thap was called by a bad person pretending to be the Hong Ngu District Police on August 2 and instructed to activate his electronic identification account; as a result, VND1.1 billion (US$40,866) in his bank account was appropriated by the man posing as a cop.
Similarly, gangsters have been taking advantage of people’s low awareness of installing the VNeID application and activating electronic identification accounts to send links via online chat applications on social networks, such as Zalo and Facebook to lure people to access the link to install fake VNeID software whose interfaces are similar to the real VNeID application.
After people installed the fake VNeID application and were granted high-level access rights, including reading personal data and reading messages containing OTP codes, fraudsters were able to control the bank account application conducting money transfers on the victim's phone and appropriate victims’ property.
Therefore, people need to increase their vigilance by identifying and reporting criminals to the police. Ho Chi Minh City Police noted that police officers only support activating electronic identification directly for people without instructions over the phone.
People should only install the VNeID application from official sources on the App Store and absolutely do not install VNeID application from external sources or from strange links;
People should note that, except for the hotline phone number of Ho Chi Minh City Police related to the field of issuance of ID cards and residence registration in the City, which is 0693.187.111, the Ministry of Public Security’s only switchboard providing guidance on VNeID is 1900.0368.
In addition to police impersonation and instruction of the activation of electronic identification to fraudulently appropriate property, criminals currently also use fraudulent tricks to impersonate functional agencies such as procuracy and courts to make fraudulent phone calls to appropriate property. People need to be very vigilant and alert against these criminals.
