Police are expected to charge Luong Thi Hai, 31, Pham Thi Tu, 61, and four others with human trafficking, trafficking in persons under 16, mediating illegal entry and extortion.
The victims included girls under 16 and mentally ill people, authorities said.
In 2015, Hai went to China as a worker, got married and stayed there.
Realizing that many Chinese men wanted Vietnamese wives, she decided to deceive the women and sell them there.
In 2018, she met Tu and Huynh Mong Linh, 45, through a group that brokered marriages between Vietnamese women and foreign men online.
Together, they sought out women in difficult circumstances, with low literacy skills or divorced women in the Mekong Delta and neighboring regions to lure them to China.
They would persuade victims to take photos of themselves and their personal identification documents and pass them on to people at the border, who would take them into China via less traveled paths in Lang Son and Cao Bang provinces. for 40 million VND (1,660 US dollars). You transported the victims to Hanoi from Can Tho or HCMC and took them to the border.
Once in China, they were taken to a hotel in Henan province, where they were watched by Hai before being sold to local men.
Those who resist would be threatened and beaten by Hai’s henchmen.
Chinese men would pay him between 200 and 400 million VND for a wife.
She would send between 140 and 160 million VND to Tu in Vietnam, and each would bring back between 80 and 100 million VND after expenses.
You would give the victims’ families between 20 and 100 million VND.
After marriage, many victims were abused and beaten by their husbands. If they wanted to return to Vietnam, the ring would force their family to return all the money they had received and a little extra to transport the victims.
Authorities said that between 2019 and 2022, the ring earned around VND1 billion.