The fallout of messing with Vietnamese immigration law

I recently obtained a long-term visa for Vietnam that at least in theory, never ends. If you follow my stuff you already know that I got an investment visa which while expensive, has its benefits and most of the people that I know and hang out with have to do some sort of border run every 45-90 days. Some of those people have to spend several days out of the country between their visas to Vietnam and while many of them treat this as a mini vacation of sorts, others see it is a huge nuisance. I guess it kind of depends on what kind of person you are.

There is a friend of mine that had an investment visa before and then one day he was busted for having illegitimate paperwork and has been banned from re-entering Vietnam for close to a year now. I was the first person to say that I didn't think that an actual blacklist really existed here in Vietnam, but apparently it does. The reason why this isn't handed out very often is because of the fact that it requires a ruling from the head Immigration office in Hanoi to make it happen so basically, it isn't worth the time of the officials in charge to bother with it on a case-by-base basis for minor infractions such as overstaying a visa which is a crime in theory, but it has a simple and easily applied fee structure associated with it. Other actual crimes such as assault and what not also rarely if ever result in black-listing too because the crime committed doesn't have anything to do with Immigration and therefore they normally will keep the two things separate. Obviously something a bit more egregious than simple assault would result in a blacklist but seriously, if you say, committed armed robbery of a bank and did time in a Vietnamese prison and then were released 10 years later, I don't think that staying in this country would be terribly high on your list of priorities.

Yet a friend of mine has been blacklisted properly for the past year yet he didn't commit any crime that involved police. So what happened?

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We'll call him Tim even though that isn't his name. Tim was one of those guys that was sort of the envy of all the rest of us because he never had to do visa runs because he had an investment visa and all that perks that come along with that. It was expensive, although he never told us the details. I only found out how expensive it is after the fact when I was applying. Tim was inexplicably denied re-entry to the country and he would always tell us that he doesn't understand why this is happening to him. Well as it turns out he finally fessed up about a month ago after 10 months of being continually denied entry to the country and living in Thailand and Japan in the meantime.

He intentionally deceived the Immigration officials with bogus bank statements

This is something that will initially get approval because Immigration normally doesn't have time to authenticate the validity of the paperwork that you supply them with. They will take it at face value as long as it has the necessary signatures on the papers. So if you put in a bank statement that says you have invested a certain amount of money in something and a bank official signs off on it, the government just assumes that you are telling the truth.

Well, a little over a year ago a very very high-profile case involving billions of dollars of embezzlement by one particular high-society Vietnamese person (who received the death-penalty for her crimes) initiated a massive overhaul on the part of the government and they started to investigate the validity of bank records that were being submitted across the board. While they were doing this (and I am speculating here) they decided to overlap all the various government agencies so that they could all have access to real records all at once. One of those things that they started checking was investment records by EVERYONE, including small investments on the part of foreigners that are living here on investment visas. This is because a large part of what the lady who stole billions was doing was falsifying bank records.

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As you would expect, there are a lot of banks in Vietnam but this being a communist country and all, the government doesn't exactly ask for permission to access your records. The government asks, said bank complies if they want to continue being a bank. Now they didn't single out my friend Tim and he was a very minor player in the game and didn't even realize that he was part of said game. While the government was doing their audit they discovered very large fake investments on the part of foreigners - much much more than my friend Tim had purported to invest. When they busted these high-profile individuals it was normally more of busting the company in question rather than the individual but they couldn't simply let the investors get away scot-free.

Tim got busted because he lied about an investment out of fear of the company not being something viable and it turns out he was a bit correct about that because after the audit, it turns out that the company he was investing in had been falsifying their accounts for years in order to obtain lines of credit with banks. This is a no-no in the business world and the government went all in on prosecuting the company Tim invested in, and well, they had to go after the individual investors as well. They can't just let them walk with no penalty. So when they discovered that Tim had invested something like $4000, when his statements stated that he invested 10 times that amount, they did the only thing they could to to him.... kick him out of the country.

He will be allowed back in at some point, he is hopeful that it will be this October, but then he will likely face an uphill battle if he ever wants to be involved in business here at any point in the future. They are going to be very reluctant to allow someone to do business here that has already kind of proven that he is more than willing to defraud the system if he gets a chance to do so.

During our heart-to-heart Tim speculated that the only reason why the company, and not him, was prosecuted was because the legal proceedings would be too complicated and that international law and National Entities including Embassies could potentially get involved in the process. Immigration doesn't need the approval of any other agency or government to ban you from entering the country, so Tim assumed this was his rather vigorous "slap on the wrist."

I think it is an effective one though because Tim really wants to come back here but simply cannot. He has tried to find people to bribe via an agent (which normally works) but since this already went to the main office there is nobody to bribe except for someone at the tippy-top who is much more interested in increasing his or her stake in the communist party than they are in a thousand bucks to be involved themselves in falsifying paperwork.

Tim has learned his lesson and has stated that he would never do it again. It's just kind of ironic that it took a billionaire doing a much larger version of the same thing that he was doing (or the company he was involved in much more than himself) in order for him to get busted. He had been doing this for years with no penalty.

My experience overseas has taught me a lot of things about how Immigration in various countries function. You might think you are smarter than they are and can pull the wool over their eyes with some fake papers and for the most part, you are correct. This isn't because you are smarter than they are though, it is because you are small potatoes and they don't really care... they are just ticking boxes on a form for what is in essence, a really irrelevant piece of the overall puzzle. However! When things and most importantly people change you can count on them discovering your missteps eventually.

For me, I thought the right thing to do was to comply to the "letter of the law." I am secure in knowing that I've done nothing nefarious and if my records were audited they would be like "yeah, this guy is fine" and move on. I would much rather live this way.

In retrospect Tim thinks what he did was really stupid and wouldn't try to do it again. You reap what you sow!