Vietnamese police have arrested five people suspected of attracting investors to the fraudulent crypto scheme Biconomynft. The attackers guaranteed investors large profits and then disappeared with the funds received.

Police in Nghe An province arrested two Vietnamese residents on charges of participating in an international crypto scheme, the creators of which were located in Laos. According to law enforcement officials, one of the detainees visited Laos in September 2023, after which he joined a group of scammers. During a large-scale investigation, Vietnamese police arrested three more people on suspicion of links to a criminal gang.

According to law enforcement, in February 2023, scammers began creating fake Facebook accounts to establish romantic relationships and convince victims to invest in cryptocurrencies. They first gained the trust of investors by paying them a small profit. However, when people invested larger amounts, scammers blocked their accounts and froze their funds.

For example, one of the scammers pretended to be a woman on the Internet. He gained the trust of a man from Ho Chi Minh City and tricked him into investing in the fake app Biconomynft, promising him large profits. Over the course of several months, the attacker “extorted” more than 17.6 billion Vietnamese dong (about $700,000) from the man.

Recently, Vietnamese authorities, with the assistance of South Korea, uncovered another group of crypto scammers that deceived 230 investors and stole 10 billion won ($7.5 million) in digital assets from them. The criminals sent their victims wedding invitations, funeral announcements, package delivery notices and other messages in which they pretended to be family members. After analyzing 300,000 suspicious transactions, police arrested 86 people in South Korea and abroad.

Last year, Vietnamese police began investigating the Pi Network cryptocurrency project over concerns that investing in it could be very risky.