A Ukrainian national and two others from Vietnam received jail terms after being found guilty of operating a high-interest lending scheme with rates as high as 792%.
On Tuesday, the Ho Chi Minh City People's Court handed down sentences of seven months, 29 days, and one year respectively to Tymur Bugaievskvi, aged 36, Iryna Kravchuk, 41, and Le Thanh Huynh Cang, 54, for engaging in usury within civil transactions.
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Tymur Bugaievskvi is undergoing court proceedings in Ho Chi Minh City on June 30, 2026. Image courtesy of Binh Nguyen |
Twenty-seven additional individuals were handed penalties varying between a fine of VND200 million (US$7,600) and a jail term of one year and four months for committing the same crime.
Police concluded that Roman Katerynchyk, another Ukrainian individual, was the leader of the operation but had fled the country before the gang was dismantled.
Starting from 2019, through personal networks, Cang met Roman and assisted him in investigating financial investments in Vietnam prior to their formation of several businesses involved in usury.
At first, three entities were set up: OnCredit, Loi Tin (located in the previous Phu Nhuan District of Ho Chi Minh City), and Ixora (formerly in District 2).
They were licensed to engage in different business activities but provided only predatory loans via applications and online platforms.
By 2023, the group came under greater attention from regulators and consequently scaled back activities.
In April of that same year, OnCredit received a penalty from the HCMC police for conducting activities beyond its officially registered business range. Katerynchyk directed Cang to briefly halt operations and then departed the country.
Subsequently, he instructed Cang to restart activities, develop protocols for establishing additional businesses, hire staff, and create more firms, each tasked with a particular phase of the loan procedure.
Cang utilized family members and friends as proxies to set up the companies Loc Tin, Cactus, and Vinex, which collaborated with Ixora to provide loans via the OnCredit app and the websites Oncredit.vn and Easycash.vn.
Katerynchyk dispatched multiple individuals from Ukraine to work in HCMC, such as Bugaievskvi tasked with building the client rating software and Kravchuk responsible for handling debt collection, business expansion, and overseeing staff.
As per the judicial decision, the loan applications and web platforms were developed in Ukraine.
Client details, agreements, loan files, and every financial record were kept on overseas servers.
Staff members in Vietnam were allowed to view and modify information but couldn't download or duplicate it.
In order to hide the high-interest charges, firms reported a daily interest rate of 0.054%, equivalent to 19.44% annually, staying within lawful boundaries.
However, borrowers were required to cover multiple charges like advisory services, agreement extensions, and overdue payment fines, which increased the effective interest rate to between 365% and 792% annually based on the specific loan plan.
For borrowing money, clients needed to install the application or visit Oncredit.vn and Easycash.vn, submit personal details along with a selfie, and grant the program permission to view their contacts and specific mobile data.
The details were subsequently input into a rating framework developed by Bugaievskvi to evaluate creditworthiness for either accepting or declining requests.
According to data from the companies' systems, 20 clients took out a loan of VND905 million and were obligated to pay back almost VND1.2 billion. Out of this amount, VND268 million was paid as interest—compared to just VND8 million if the legal regulations had been adhered to.