Another arrest made in fake psychic scam in Vietnam

HANOI: Police in central Vietnam arrested a seventh person in connection to a fake psychic who claimed he could locate the remains of soldiers missing-in-action in exchange for cash, authorities said Wednesday.
Nguyen Anh Thieu was charged with "interfering with human corpses, graves and or remains," Colonel Nguyen Huynh Duong, chief of investigations in Quang Tri provincial police department, said.
He could face up to five years in jail.
Thieu is accused of being part of a ring which claimed to have located 100 sets of remains in central and southern provinces, taking dozens of them from several cemeteries, Duong said.
He is the son-in-law of self-proclaimed psychic Nguyen Thanh Thuy, who was arrested in 2013 on charges of "swindling to appropriate assets," after being paid by the Vietnam Bank of Social Policies to find the bodies of soldiers who died during the war.
Thuy was paid US$3,500 for the discovery of each set of remains, local media reported, but an investigation later revealed many of the remains to be pig and cat bones.
"Besides cheating the bank, they cheated a lot of individuals," policeman Duong said.
"However, we have not calculated how much money they took yet because many individuals, including officials, who were cheated do not want to report to the police because they feel ashamed about being cheated in this way."
Ancestor worship is very common in Vietnam, and many believe the body must be buried correctly or the soul will not rest.
Millions of Vietnamese died during the war in the 1960s and 70s, and about 400,000 have never been found. – dpa