By June 2011, Hong’s cousin Oanh was breaking down in tears almost every day when she looked at me. Hong always brushed it off, saying Oanh was just having family troubles, that it wasn’t about me. But I knew something was off.
In early July, I could feel the pressure building, the sense that an attack was coming. I decided to take the $90,000 I still had in Vietnam and check into a 4-star hotel for safety. But when I woke up, Hong and our son were gone. She wouldn’t answer my calls or tell me where she’d taken him.
As I prepared to leave, Co Hai, the nanny, and Oanh stopped me at the door, both with tears in their eyes. I asked Oanh directly if there were men waiting for me outside. She nodded, “Yes.” “How many?” I asked. “Three,” she whispered. I told her I could handle it, grabbed the money, and walked out. Sure enough, I was tailed the whole way by three men on motorcycles, circling like sharks as I made my escape. I was able to outrun two of them but the third stayed within 10 feet of me the entire time.
Route map showing chase from house to hotel
What I Did for Hong’s Family
I am still amazed at how evil Hong’s family and friends could be. I always smiled and said hello to anybody I made eye contact with and treated Hong and her family like Gold. Here are a few examples of what I did for them:
- Built Hong’s family a house
- Bought all her uncles and her father new motorcycles (9 in all) and bought her father a second motorcycle when the first one got stolen
- Bought her sister a Beauty Salon / Massage Parlor for $5,000 U.S. Dollars
- Financially took care of her entire family, even her uncle’s children
- Bailed her brother out of jail by paying a $1,000 bribe to the police
- Gave Hong’s cousin Kiwi 10 million dong ($500 US) when somebody stole her money in Hanoi
- Paid for half of her sister Tuoi’s Vespa and gave Tuoi an iPhone
- Offered to pay for Hong’s cousin Oanh to go to school and give her money to live on
The Electronics Store Hack
When it came to scamming an American, everyone seemed willing to play their part; even major electronics stores. In late June 2011, desperate for a clean computer after all mine had been compromised, I headed to a massive electronics store near my house, six stories tall and sprawling across an entire city block. I thought I’d find some sense of security in a place that size, but in Vietnam, the web of the scam stretched further than I could have imagined. When it was time to scam an American, even the big players got involved. In late June 2011, after realizing all my computers were hacked, I went to that huge store, hoping to finally buy a machine I could trust.
It didn’t take long to realize the new computer I bought had already been compromised. After picking out the laptop I wanted, they made me wait 45 minutes while they “installed Windows.” What I actually got was a hacked version of Windows 7, one that let them access my machine before the BIOS even finished loading.
I had an eerie feeling about the new laptop since they made me wait to install the OS, so tried to outsmart them by plugging in an external keyboard and entering my BIOS password that way once I noticed that the external keyboard acted strangely whenever you pressed the 4 on the numpad. While using the external keyboard, hitting the “4” on the num-pad would trigger a backspace on the bios login rather than insert the number 4. I experimented and realized they’d hacked me at the BIOS level. When I entered the password using the external keyboard the second time, the computer blue-screened and never powered on again. Their hacked bios interpreted that I entered the password correctly even though the computer accepted the 4’s in the password entry as backspaces. Rather than the password being entered as 88888844, it effectively entered on the screen as 8888 since the two 4’s caused two backspaces. I was in awe at the level of expertise their hackers had.
Not willing to give up, I went back the next day and bought a MacBook Air; this time without telling Hong. As I was paying, I watched the salesman take the laptop to the service desk. I ran over to stop the tech from doing whatever he was trying to do and saw several small windows pop up on the screen, as if Windows drivers were being installed. But this was a MacBook, not a Windows machine.
Pictured below is a dongle that ran some type of script when plugged in. All they needed to do was plug this into any computer and the machine was theirs at the earliest part of the boot process. While arguing with the service guy, I realized that I left my bag at the counter and saw a guy getting off the escalator put what looked to be the 3G Wi-Fi Dongle back in my bag. I never used it after that day.
Even the cable company was in on it. When they came to install my internet, they brought a modem preloaded with DD-WRT—firmware perfect for surveillance. I went to the cable storefront, saw a stack of brand-new modems right there, and asked for one. They told me they had none available, but they’d send one over to my house in 45 minutes. Now I realize why: they needed time to hack it first, to make sure they could monitor everything I did online. The local police were part of the scheme. All it took was a phone call, and the cable staff played along—smiling the whole time, acting like it was business as usual.
Better Tracking Than UPS
They always seemed to know my next move. Hong would tip them off, or they’d catch it by eavesdropping on my conversations. There was no privacy, no way to stay a step ahead.
Once, I went to file a police report because Hong refused to tell me where she’d taken our son. I’d called her ten times that day; nothing. But the moment I set foot inside the police station, my phone rang. It was Hong. She knew exactly where I was, and exactly when. There was no such thing as a secret in that world. The police station I entered happened to be a big police station ran by the communist government, not the local police that were corrupt, so Hong was petrified.
Hong’s I.D. with police officer’s notes
July 13th, 2011 – LIES, LIES & More LIES
Right before I left Vietnam for the first time in July 2011, I agreed to meet up with some of Hong’s so-called ex-friends “Kieu & Nhan” at a hotel, forty-five minutes away by motorcycle. The second I walked in, I felt the tension. Something was off. I trusted my gut and left after just five minutes. Hong supposedly wasn’t talking to them at all anymore.
Hong when I left the Hotel and was 5-minutes down the road. She was furious; far more than the situation warranted. That’s when it hit me: her “ex-friends” were never out of her circle. They’d tried one last setup, hoping to frame me before I could get out. When I left early, their plan fell apart, and they must have called Hong to let her know. Time was running out for them, I was set to leave in just a couple of days, taking my dogs and the remaining $90,000 I had. They were desperate for one final shot, and I slipped through their fingers.
Two days later, a week after Johnny arrived to help me make my escape, we loaded up my dogs and headed to the airport, bound for LA. Getting through security with $90,000 was nerve-wracking. But luck, or something else, was on my side. The security staff got caught up dealing with a couple ahead of us, giving me just enough of a window to slip my cash through the x-ray belt without drawing attention. It was another close call, one final brush with disaster before I finally made it out.
After making it back to America with my dogs in mid-July 2011, I rented a car and drove cross-country from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh. I wanted to spare my dogs another flight, and honestly, I needed the long stretch of highway to clear my head after everything I’d just survived.
But it didn’t take long before the old patterns started to creep back in. Within a week of being home, Hong was already pulling me back into her web, her calls, her stories, her manipulations. We started talking civilly again, and by August 1st, I was boarding a plane back to Vietnam. Just three suitcases and a debit card. I missed my son so much, the risk didn’t matter anymore.
I’d only been in Vietnam a day before the games started up again. Hong kept pestering me to get coffee in the morning and told me to bring my computer. We weren’t at the café more than fifteen minutes when my laptop flashed a warning: another device on the network was using the same IP address. I scanned the room, five tables occupied, but two guys stood out. Each had two phones. In Vietnam, that’s not normal. They were the ones trying to hack me, and Hong had led me right to them.
I leaned in and told her, point blank, that the guys next to us were hacking my computer and it was time to leave. We had my son with us, or I might have confronted them then and there. Hong just played dumb, like she always did, pretending she had no idea what was going on. But by then, I knew better.
A Rare Tear!
About a week after the coffee shop hacker incident in mid-august 2011, I reflected on the extent of what they planned to do to me on the airplane. I said to Hong, “OMG! I can’t believe people could be so evil; they didn’t care about me, my son, or my family and only cared about their greed.” Hong started crying very hard and wouldn’t stop for ten minutes. She never cried after that day.
Mui Ne Vietnam – 5 hours by motorcycle from HCMC
In September 2011, we packed up; Hong, our son, the nanny Co Hai, and me, and moved to Mui Ne, a beach town about five hours from Ho Chi Minh City. I was desperate to get away from HCMC, hoping a change of scenery might finally shake the constant hacking and surveillance. We stayed in a hotel while searching for a place to rent.
On our very first day out looking, Hong suddenly insisted we stop at a fruit stand to buy snacks for her cousins, who had come along for the first week. She’d never done that before, but I didn’t think much of it. The stand barely had anything worth buying. As it turned out, the woman running it “just happened” to have a brand-new rental property up the street; move-in ready. Looking back, it was obvious: Hong had orchestrated the stop. The woman was connected to the Triads, and the whole setup was part of their plan.
I’d originally wanted to go to a different beach, one with far fewer scams, a better crowd, and lots of Westerners. Hong and her cousins pushed hard for Mui Ne, and I let them have their way. Now I know why: Mui Ne was easier for them to control, fewer foreigners to warn me, fewer chances for me to learn the truth about how some locals view Westerners.
When I told Hong to make sure we got fast Internet, the installer refused to give me the router password. I pressed, but he wouldn’t budge. It was already set up for surveillance, another layer in the web they’d been spinning around me since the beginning.
While living in Mui Ne from September to December 2011, I did manage to befriend a few Westerners. Both of them warned me: the locals would band together to scam you, which is why they kept such a low profile. They drove beat-up motorcycles, dressed down, and made a point of looking like they had nothing worth taking. It was all about survival and flying under the radar.
Hong and her crew were true opportunists, but they weren’t bold. They only struck when they were absolutely certain they’d succeed. After just two weeks in Mui Ne, I saw a guy who looked completely wasted, barely able to stand, being “helped” by two young Vietnamese men outside the only modern convenience store I’d seen in Vietnam. I didn’t think much of it at first. Later, Hong told me she almost asked me to intervene because she knew he was being scammed, but by then, the men and their victim were long gone.
Thinking back, I doubt he was just drunk, it was probably a date rape drug. My friend Johnny fell victim to the same trick in HCMC on July 13th, 2011, the day before we left. He blacked out at a bar and woke up in an alley, his money gone. It happens a lot; always watch your drink in Asia, and never let it out of your sight. It’s not just about theft; it’s an easy way to incapacitate someone before robbing them or, in darker cases, something far worse, like organ trafficking.
Having so much cash in the house only put a bigger target on my back. Looking back to late June 2011, when I was still in HCMC, I remember how the neighborhood guys who once waved at me started glaring with open hatred. I know now they were in on it the entire time, only friendly because they were waiting for my downfall. When it never came, their real feelings surfaced. Their patience had run out, and the mask finally slipped.
In early November 2011, everything came to a head in Mui Ne. The moment I realized Hong was fully involved yet again, she snapped; screaming at me about who I was talking to online. The fight escalated fast. She grabbed our son and held a knife to him, shouting, “I’ll kill him before I let you take him.” Instinct took over—I rushed her and wrestled the knife away.
Hong yelled something in Vietnamese to Co Hai, who immediately left the room. Hong claimed she’d told Co Hai to call the police. I stepped into the hallway and watched as Co Hai went out to the porch, screamed something into the night, and came back inside without waiting for a response. That’s when it hit me: she wasn’t calling the police, she was calling for backup.
I quickly left for a hotel down the street, but after ten minutes, I circled back. Four motorcycles, each with two people, seven men and one woman, all in their twenties, were parked at every corner around the house, exactly as shown on the satellite map below. Too many to take on alone, so I went back to the hotel.
I wanted to catch them on video, but by the time I returned, they were gone. After twenty minutes in the hotel room, I couldn’t help myself and went back to the house, phone camera rolling, ready for whatever might happen. My English was broken in the video. I spoke that way because Hong understood it better in the heat of the moment.
About a week later, we left Mui Ne for good. We made it back to HCMC, and after a week, I finally boarded a flight to America with my son. The moment the plane lifted off, at 11:55 PM on December 2nd, 2011, my son’s first birthday, I felt a relief I can’t put into words. We were finally free.
Satellite map showing motorcycle positions
