Taiwanese fraud suspect escapes from Vietnam prison
Thanh Nien News
HO CHI MINH CITY - Thursday, February 05, 2015 12:58 Email Print
Ho Chi Minh City police have issued a warrant for a Taiwanese national who broke out of prison while awaiting trail for fraud.
The warrant for Chen Guo-liang says his right arm features a large tattoo.
Police say the 41-year-old headed a Taiwanese fraud ring that conned Vietnamese marks into depositing money into bank accounts that the ring controlled over the telephone.
The ring's members often posed as investigators and tried to convince their victims that they'd been caught up in a criminal investigation and had to deposit a certain amount of money into an account controlled by the "investigators."
The victims were promised that if they were vindicated, their money would be returned.
A police photo of Chen Guo-liang who is awaiting a trial for fraud.
Chen's gang had reportedly conned its victims out of a total of VND2.5 billion (US$117,200) by the time he was arrested in August of last year.
Chen was being held at Chi Hoa in District 10.
The major municipal prison was initially built by the French to hold Vietnamese revolutionaries.
News website VnExpress quoted a police official as saying Thursday that Chen managed to flee away while he was being escorted to a interrogation session.
The area where the police lost track of him was still inside the prison compound but pretty close to a residential area, the official said.
This represents the second prison break reported there since Vietnam assumed control of the prison in 1954.
The first jailbreak occurred in 1995 when Nguyen Huu Thanh, a Vietnamese death row inmate, spent days sawing off his leg iron and digging a tunnel through a rotten wall in the jail’s toilet.
