American jailed for 13 years in Vietnam's first phone piracy conviction
HANOI - A US national has been jailed for 13 years and ordered to pay compensation of four million dollars to the state
telecoms monopoly in Vietnam's first ever phone piracy conviction, officials said Wednesday.
Vietnamese-American Nguyen Duc Tam, 35, was found guilty of using equipment imported from the United
States to run a rival telephone service using Vietnam Post and Telecoms' (VNPT) lines, a court official in the
commercial capital of Ho Chi Minh City told AFP.
In its 11 months of operation between October 1998 and Tam's arrest in September 1999, his underground
business clocked up a whopping 5.5 million minutes of international calls.
Using 48 telephones set up in a private home in the city's Chinatown of Cholon, Tam was able to offer the huge
number of residents with relatives in the million-strong emigre community cheap calls to and from the United
States.
He was convicted of "theft of state property" and "illegally installing hi-tech equipment" at Tuesday's one-day
trial.
Vietnam has some of the highest telecommunications charges in the world, making any alternative to the state
monopoly, legal or otherwise, extremely attractive for the country's hard-pressed phone users.
Agence France Presse - August 29, 2001.
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