Starting this month, banks all across Vietnam will begin deleting over 86,000,000 bank accounts that have not been “verified” under the countries new digital ID scheme.
The State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) are calling it a “system clean-up measure”.
This “clean up” is part of the government’s “digital transformation” plan, a drive to “modernise” the country’s information infrastructure, and more specifically a drive to promote non-cash payments.
Speaking at a press conference promoting “Cashless Day” earlier this year, Pham Anh Tuan, Director of the Payment Department at the SBV called it “a data-cleansing revolution”.
Central to this “revolution” is the new “Decree on Regulations for Electronic Identification and Authentication”, passed in July of 2024 and coming in to force July 1st of this year.
Under this new law, all bank accounts – corporate and personal – need to be biometrically verified in one of two ways:
- Using an NFC chip-based identity card, where the facial image is stored in the embedded chip.
- Through a level 2 account in the government’s VNeID app. A level 2 account requires submission of a fingerprint scan.
Any bank account not verified in this way by September 1st was subject to freezing, and then termination.
So, here we are. 86 MILLION bank accounts forfeited and shut down. What is the justification?
Simple, they are fake bank accounts for criminal enterprises.
It aims to prevent common fraud schemes recently, such as fake accounts for receiving money, withdrawals from accounts without proper ownership, or money laundering via digital banking channels.
To quote Pham Anh Tuan again…
all accounts without biometric data will be closed to prevent scams and fraud.
For reference sake, the total population of Vietnam is estimated to be about 101 million people. The SBV estimates there were roughly 200 million personal bank accounts before the “clean up”, there are now 113 million.
So, the official position is that fully 43% of all the bank accounts in the country belonged to “fake people” and were being used for money laundering or other criminal activities.
…does that really seem likely?
Does it not seem rather more likely that a good portion of those accounts belonged to people who were either unwilling or unable to verify their account?
Who are these millions of people suddenly, potentially, without access to their money?
We don’t know, and none of the articles care enough to even ask.
They are simply swept aside, labelled “fake people” or money launderers or something equally shady. They are non-people now.
That’s a little flash of how Digital ID schemes are going to work for all of us.