Hans was exhausted and was taking a well deserved holiday after a stressful autumn season. Some friends recommended travelling to Vietnam as it was a country where he could get much more out of his money than in other places.
His departure was on the 15th December 2009, via Stockholm and then onwards to Saigon (A great city with 7 million inhabitants), where he planned on stopping for a couple of days before completing his holiday on one of the idyllic islands on the coast. Hans travelled alone and only a selected few knew where he was going so that he could completely relax.
He is quite used to being around people and meeting new people on a daily basis, that's one of the things he likes best about his job. On his first day in Saigon, he met a couple in a local sidewalk restaurant and he was soon having a friendly conversation with them.
They sat and talked for a while. Hans doesn't quite remember exactly how long they were talking. They only drank soft drinks and tea. No alcohol!
In hindsight, we really have to wonder whether this really was a 'chance' meeting or if he walked into a trap.
I'm Hans' boss and I received a strange SMS from him during the day on the 17th. He said he needed more money and wondered if I could help him. I asked him to send me a mail which he did and that was even stranger than the text and it almost didn't seem like the guy that I'd gotten to know the past 2 years that we worked together. I answered both the SMS and the mail and asked him several questions just so that I could confirm my suspicions. This went on for a couple of days.
'Why did he need more money, especially since he just got paid?' I was thinking.
After a while, he realised that some things had been happening that somehow he wasn't too aware of and had no control over.
I had earlier been given his password to his bank account, so I looked into his account and realised that he only had 14 Norwegian Kroner s left in it. 35,000 Kroner's had been taken out in the past 2 days. I knew that he was due to travel further and would need much more than 14 Kroner's to get through the next 10-12 days of his holiday.
It turns out that he had been drugged either though his tea or soft drink which we believe had been administered to him by his 'new friends'. While he was drugged, they'd taken him round to several ATM machines and made him withdraw money as well as going to various jewellers and had basically emptied his account.
When he was back to himself and realised the situation he was in, we contacted the police and the insurance company to see if they could help. The insurance company only offered 3000 Kroner's as the maximum sum they could replace. This didn't help much as the hotel bill alone was already more than 4000 Kroner's. We didn't know what to do, he didn't have any credit cards with him and the cash he'd taken 1000 dollars had also been stolen.
We thought of cancelling his banks Visa card but how was he going to get money? We decided to tread cautiously and I transferred 1000 Kroner's into his account. He went to the nearest ATM and was able to withdraw the money with no problems. I then transferred 5000 Kroner's. When he got to the ATM, he couldn't withdraw any money because it told him his account was on 0!
It turns out that his 'friends' had somehow managed to get their hands on that money too and once again he was in a foreign country completely penniless.
It's now the 23rd December and I suddenly remembered that I had gotten him a Towah Card a few months before. I asked him whether he had it with him or not. The card was actually still in his wallet but he didn't have any money in his account.
We totally needed some good advice, so I placed a call to the Towah office. I explained the situation and that he was stranded in Vietnam with no money because he'd been robbed. It was actually pretty late in the day and it was our Christmas Eve, so the people who we talked to in Towah should really have been on their way home or out buying their last Christmas presents but they were there for us and presented us with a solution.
In just a short while, Hans had money in his account. He was extra cautious with the amount that he transferred to his card each time and we were grateful for Towah's double security feature.
Towah saved Hans's holiday right in the nick of time. The leaders in Towah and their staff really came through for us. This whole experience has made us think how important it is to control how much money you have available on your card at all times and that you should only transfer what you need to your card when you need it.
If Hans had just been using his Towah card on this holiday, it would have been more or less impossible to have gotten away with that robbery as the amount on his card would have been limited to what he'd transferred there.
We also got in contact with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Norwegian Embassy in Vietnam. They helped as much as they could but even their help was very limited.
Thank you Towah!
General Manager, East Norway!
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