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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

I'm also skeptical about the $660M number. To put that in perspective, Vietnam's GDP is $232B, so this is about 0.3% of Vietnamese GDP. 0.3% of the US GDP would be about $50 billion.

FWIW most articles I'm finding source the $660M number to the linked Tuoi Tre News story. Their quote is "The victims said the company had conned them out of VND15 trillion (US$660.79 million)." https://tuoitrenews.vn/news/business/20180409/vietnamese-cry...

I have no doubt there was yet another ICO scam with someone walking away with the money, but I wonder how much money it was.

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The "investors" (ahem) are no doubt counting their expected returns as the amount they are out, rather than their capital outlay.

I just searched around and there is a fair chance the number might be legit. In the first paragraph of this article [1], it says that the amount in VND is converted from 650MM in USD, taken from the ICO organized by the Modern Tech company.

I think a comparison to the wealth is fairer than to the GDP. There are quite a lot of under-reported revenue streams in Vietnam. It's definitely still a sizable chunk though and any dollar amount assigned to cryptocurrencies should be taken with a big grain of salt but I can definitely see it happening.

[1] https://kinhdoanh.vnexpress.net/tin-tuc/doanh-nghiep/nha-dau...

$660 million across 32,000 people is over 20 grand per person. That seemed a little crazy to me.

That is the legit number. And actually, the scammers built their profiles by leading a lot of winning ICO investing campaigns before that. People just had to follow their investing scheme, put money in their so-called portfolio, and made tons of money from it, so they trust these "experts". Then they claimed iFan and Pincoin were the biggest opportunity. People were so greedy to realise the truth tho.

Maybe they are so good that they were able to get most people of means in Vietnam to invest?

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