Vietnam plans an inter-agency command centre against online fraud

Vietnam's Government is proposing a standing inter-agency operations centre to fight online fraud through 2030, and wants artificial intelligence and digital data to do much of the detection work. The plan was set out on the morning of 5 November, when Minister of Public Security Luong Tam Quang presented the investment policy for the National Target Programme on drug prevention and crime control for 2026-2035 to the National Assembly.

The minister framed technology as one of the programme's central answers to criminal methods that are becoming harder to see and faster to change. Alongside the inter-agency centre, the plan calls for stronger links between existing databases, deeper data analysis, wider use of AI, and modern equipment for the forces doing the work.

What the targets actually say

By 2030 the programme aims to have more than 90% of crime data digitised, standardised, cleaned and synchronised with the National Population Database and the Electronic Identity Database. Data analysis and AI are expected to be applied in 70% of the cases and incidents requested by operational units.

The Government also wants to identify, detect and manage entire criminal groups, then dismantle or break them up, and stop them from re-forming or spawning new ones.

Those are operational targets, not procurement targets. The 90% figure is about whether investigators can trust what their systems show them; the 70% figure is about whether analytics is actually used in live casework rather than demonstrated in a review. Both depend on the unglamorous part of the programme: agreeing what a record means, who may see it, and how quickly it can be shared across ministries that historically kept their own copies.

The drugs half of the programme

The same programme sets drug targets for 2030: at least 50% of communes, wards and special zones nationwide free of drugs; detection and dismantling of all complex hotspots, risk points and retail drug sellers; and modern weapons, support tools and technical means for more than 80% of the units and officers in the dedicated anti-drug forces of the Border Guard and the Coast Guard.

Minister Luong Tam Quang said the programme was built against a backdrop of crime and drugs that remain complex, with new methods and tricks appearing, and that this poses a serious challenge to prevention and enforcement. The stated approach is prevention early, from afar and at the grassroots level, with the aim of reducing crime sustainably while cutting the supply of, demand for and harm from drugs.

Why an inter-agency centre is the interesting part

Most countries already have a fraud reporting channel. Fewer have a place where police, banks, telecoms and regulators sit with the authority to act on the same case at the same time.

That is the difference the centre is meant to create. Online fraud is rarely one crime in one jurisdiction. A call centre operates from one country, the money lands in accounts in a second, the victim is in a third, and the evidence lives with a bank, a telco and a platform that each hold a different fragment. The bottleneck is not the absence of data. It is the time lost moving a request between organisations that each have a legitimate reason to check before they answer.

An inter-agency centre compresses that time. It also changes what is possible: accounts can be frozen while the money is still moving, numbers can be cut off while a campaign is active, and patterns that appear across separate reports can be joined into one case. In fraud, latency is the whole game. The difference between a ten-minute response and a ten-day response is usually the difference between a recovered transfer and a closed file.

The hard parts are not the technology

Three problems decide whether the centre works.

The first is data quality. A model trained on records that mean different things in different provinces will produce confident nonsense. The programme's insistence on cleaning and standardising data before it is synchronised with the population and identity databases is the right order of operations, and it is also the slowest part.

The second is legal basis. Sharing identity and case data across agencies requires clear rules on purpose, retention and access. Without them, either the sharing stalls or it goes further than the public was told. The centre's authority to act, not just to look, has to be written down.

The third is false positives. AI that flags suspicious behaviour will be wrong sometimes, and at national scale "sometimes" is a large number of people. The 70% adoption target only helps if the output is reviewable, attributable and open to challenge by the officer and the citizen on the other side of it.

What to watch

The programme still needs the National Assembly's approval of its investment policy, and the centre's budget, staffing and legal mandate will be settled after that. The metric to watch is not how many systems are connected. It is how long it takes, in a real case, from a victim's report to a frozen account — and whether that number falls.

For organisations building fraud controls of their own, the same lesson applies at a smaller scale. Detection that nobody acts on is a report, not a control. The value is in the loop: see the pattern, decide who can act, and make the action fast enough to matter.

Source: the investment policy for the National Target Programme on drug prevention and crime control for 2026-2035, presented to the National Assembly on 5 November 2026 by Minister of Public Security Luong Tam Quang.

Author

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