A court in Vietnam has sentenced three Chinese men to up to nearly 13 years in prison for money laundering and providing loans worth over VND20 trillion (US$790 million) with annual interest exceeding 2,300 percent.

They committed the crimes when operating a major loan shark ring aided by 37 Vietnamese, according to court documents showing the case was uncovered last year.

After three days of trial, the People’s Court in Quang Nam Province, central Vietnam on Wednesday sentenced Lu Wang, the kingpin, to 11 years in prison for money laundering and 21 months for usury.

As such, Lu got a combined jail term of 12 years and nine months. 

Wu Jian Chao, another Chinese in the ring, received 10 years for money laundering and 15 months for usury, while Li Xiao Hu, the third Chinese defendant, got an 18-month jail term for usury.

Supporting the Chinese group were 37 Vietnamese accomplices, who received sentences ranging from a nine-month suspended term to 18 months in prison.

Among these Vietnamese, many let the ring use their names to set up bogus companies that served its activities, while the rest were inferior to the three Chinese nationals.  

According to the indictment, from 2018 to July 2023, the ring provided loans topping VND20 trillion at an annual interest rate of 2,346 percent to more than one million people nationwide through the ‘Great Vay’ app.

Other apps, including Abc Tien, cashGo, Like Tien, and Vi Dong, had their borrower database systems connected with the website https://xxxxxx.com, whose server is located in Singapore’s Alibaba Cloud.

Investigators discovered that many people were encouraged to install the loan shark’s apps where borrowers could receive loans rapidly, but at usurious interest rates.

During the period, the ring carried out money laundering activities and illegally transferred their proceeds out of Vietnam, gaining illicit profits totaling VND5 trillion ($197.2 million).

The racket used dozens of fake companies and utilized thousands of bank accounts for money laundering and illegal overseas money transfers.

Lu, the ring’s mastermind, utilized a portion of the unlawfully acquired funds to purchase real estate in Ho Chi Minh City as one of his methods of money laundering.

Throughout the debt collection process, members of the ring resorted to using threatening, slanderous, and defamatory language toward borrowers who were late in repaying loan principal or interest.

These members even went as far as posting images of their customers or their citizen identification cards on social media, or creating collages that juxtaposed borrowers' photos with sexually explicit content to shame and pressure debtors into repaying their debts promptly.

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