Vietnamese man gets life for MIA scam
The Associated Press reports that the Vietnamese government sentenced Nguyen Van Thuy to life in prison for stealing more than 70 sets of remains of unidentified bodies from the war and then convincing families that those remains were their family members. The article says that there are more than 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers still missing from the war making it easy pickings for fraudsters like Thuy and his family. By the way, he wasn’t the only one convicted – his wife and four other relatives were sentenced for up to 25 years for their participation in the fraud.
Thuy, who claimed to have paranormal power, and his accomplices cheated $363,000 from a charitable fund set up by the Vietnam Bank for Social Policies and from 12 Vietnamese families by charging a fee to find the dead and missing soldiers, he said.
The families paid Thuy 100 million dong for his services. That’s a lot of dongs – but about $4500.
Category: Crime
I’m guessing that a Vietnamese prison isn’t the “Club Fed” setup they have here.
Here’s hoping his life is like the words of Hobbes: nasty, brutish, and short.
Meh, Vietnamese prisons don’t have ACLU lawers screeching for their inmates, it sounds like he’s gracefully FUCKED! Y’all excuse me while I chuckle… 😀
Let’s say he’s a good boy in prison and is paroled after, oh, 50 years. He’ll only be 106. Now, if he should die in prison, it would be a shame if they buried his ass in a shallow, unmarked, jungle grave and swore the grave diggers to silence.
I wonder if Vietnam has their own jail version of Bubba, Thor, and Tiny, to plague Mr Van Thuy’s life, and amuse everyone else?
“Dongs”?
That’s the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam communist regime’s monetary exchange unit.
When I was in the old Republic of Viet Nam, the exchange unit was called a “Piaster”, or more popularly, just plain, “P”.
For instance, a street located just outside the main gate of Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base in Saigon was known among G.I.s as, “Fifty P Alley”.
It was piastres back in the day, but got changed to “dong” in ’78. But even South Vietnamese coins were stamped “dong”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_dong
http://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces3180.html
If only we had such serious sentences for significant acts of fraud and the like….
I can only hope all his orifices are prepared for a lot of Dong. Long Dong at that!
Its a shame our Goverment don’t hammer stolen valor types and shysters the same way. Not that long ago some meth addled shit bag up in Yankee Land (The North East) was caught stealing brass flag holders from the graves of veterans. He got a slap on the wrist.
Used to be a conversational gambit in the bars in Saigon-that-was. “Would you hold my dong?”
Considering I was a cheap charlie, not happening.
He’s way beyond a piece of DONG…hope he dies a miserable death. Is our military personnel taking possession of the remains to check DNA. I pray ? that my POW IS IDENTIFIED. IT’S BEEN WAY TO LONG…
The article simply said “Vietnamese” as opposed to South and North. While scamming the family of any KIA or MIA deserves death by bunga-bunga, I understand the NVA sometimes burned a lot of the mass dead after battles. If the 200,000 unfound remains are NVA, “f” em, wish it were ten times that amount.