Lucy Cormack/Sydney Morning Herald
It’s tough being a foreign student living far away from home and sometimes, the only way to ease the ache of missing your family is taking a flight home during the Lunar New Year. However, one woman took that joy from over 300 students after allegedly defrauding overseas students of over $250,000 who trusted her to book their flights home for them.
Overseas students were scammed of $250,000 from a woman who sold them tickets to go home to Vietnam .(Photo: Thuy Phan/Nguoi Viet)
Reports of the alleged fraud surfaced this month, when more than 300 Vietnamese students living in Australia received invalid tickets for various overseas flights before the Lunar New Year. At that time, members of the Facebook group Vietnamese Dynamic Students at the University of Technology, Sydney, had bought discounted Vietnam Airlines tickets through one of its female members.
They paid about $1140 each to travel from Melbourne and Sydney to Hanoi and Saigon. By purchasing their tickets through the woman, students got discounts of about $300-$400. Some students had bought tickets from the woman before, without incident, and had recommended her.
However, about 240 students found their tickets to be invalid for a portion or the whole of their journeys. Some students even showed up at the airport with their luggage only to be turned away with no record of their booking. Seeking answers, students in the group visited the woman’s home in Petersham, in Sydney’s inner west. However, the woman could not be found.
On Monday, a scanned copy of a letter from the NSW Police Force was posted on the Vietnamese Dynamic Students Facebook page, asking for “all people who believe they are victims of this fraud” to email police.
Initial investigations led police to believe the alleged fraud involved $500,000. However, further inquiries revealed the figure was closer to $360,000. The 24-year-old woman was arrested at her Petersham home on Wednesday, and charged with 10 counts of dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/woman-charged-over-360000-ticket-fraud-20160113-gm5e96.html#ixzz3xG6ue6D7
