Ex-hacker Hieu Ngo on fighting Southeast Asia’s scam surge
Cybercrime and rehabilitation
Photo courtesy of Hieu Ngo.
If you’re American, there is roughly a 50% chance that Hieu Ngo of Vietnam stole your personal data, bank account and credit card numbers, and sold them on to other cyber-criminals.
Hieu Ngo stole data from an estimated 200 million Americans. He was arrested in the US after a Secret Service sting operation in 2013 and sent to prison in 2015.
While in prison his determination to reform himself led earned him an early release. Hieu Ngo returned to Vietnam in 2020 and became a cyber-crime investigator working with the Vietnamese police. His information has helped to arrest over 200 cyber-criminals operating in Southeast Asia.
I recently interviewed Hieu Ngo for the FT specialist publication Banking Risk and Regulation. We discussed his experiences, the explosion of cyber-crime in the region, and how banks and individuals can do more to protect themselves.
The interview can be read here, with a sign-up for a free trial.
Hieu Ngo also tells his story in his own words in a podcast here:
What can we do to protect our information?
This is old style scamming. Hieu Ngo was basically fraudently buying personal data in bulk and selling it on as a supplier to criminals for "only" a couple of million bucks.
Fast forward a decade and its way more sophisticated - we are talking organized crime, AI, billions of dollars.
A simple thing anyone can do if a website is seeking data from you and you are not sure about it is to check the veracity of the site using a free open-access tool developed bu Hieu Ngo. It can give you an instant response
https://chongluadao.vn/en