A woman in Thanh Hoa Province staged her own death for five years to fraudulently collect nearly VND1.3 billion (US$49,396) from multiple life insurance policies, according to local police.
On December 21, Thanh Hoa Provincial Police announced that investigators had uncovered a large-scale insurance fraud involving Nguyen Thi Thu (born 1984), a resident of Quang Trung Ward, Thanh Hoa City.
The case came to light on December 17, when Quang Trung Ward authorities received a request from a woman identifying herself as Nguyen Thi Thu, asking to have her death certificate annulled despite a record showing that someone of the same name had been officially declared dead five years earlier. Sensing irregularities, local police referred the matter to the provincial investigation unit, which soon confirmed that Thu had faked her death to profit from insurance claims.
Investigators found that after divorcing in 2017, Thu lived with her mother, Tran Thi Thap (born 1955), and later worked in southern provinces, during which she purchased four life insurance policies from Prudential Life Insurance Company and Phu Hung Life Insurance JSC.
In 2020, after being diagnosed with cancer and frequently arguing with her mother, Nguyen Thi Thu allegedly devised a detailed plan to fake her death both to assume a new identity and to claim the insurance money. She persuaded her mother to help stage the deception, even threatening suicide if her mother refused.
On June 7, 2020, Nguyen Thi Thu took sleeping pills, injured herself slightly to appear lifeless, and pretended to have died in the bathroom. Her mother then reported the death and organized a secret burial ceremony with the help of a local shaman. Later that night, Nguyen Thi Thu secretly left for Dong Nai Province and continued working under the radar.
The next day, her mother obtained an official death certificate citing “sudden death” and used it to claim payouts from the insurance companies. Records show that Prudential paid VND682.46 million for three policies, while Phu Hung Life paid VND600 million, totaling nearly VND1.3 billion.
Authorities reported that the money was funneled through relatives and acquaintances to conceal Thu’s identity and was later invested in real estate and “AI ventures.”
Police have seized documentation from both insurance companies and are continuing to investigate the case.
