FX Trading Markets (Lion Group) scam: the 40,000-person case

The bait: one percent a day, and the arithmetic that gives it away

It all started with a figure that sounded very “modest”: 0.8–1% interest a day, a 1,000 USD minimum deposit, and a “team of international experts trading for you”. Only one percent. It sounded far more reasonable than the platforms promising to double or triple your account.

That “modesty” was calculated bait. At 1% a day, compounded, your capital grows about 37 times in a year. Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors still alive, averaged around 20% a YEAR over six decades.

So Lion Group’s “team of experts” was claiming to be close to 200 times better than Buffett. And instead of letting billion-dollar funds queue up to hand over their money, they chose to... invite strangers on Zalo, one by one, to deposit 1,000 USD.

The arithmetic gives it away, but only to someone willing to pick up a calculator. What the 40,000 participants saw every morning was a balance that kept rising. And that balance leads straight to the next question.

Where did the daily “interest” actually come from?

There was no “team of experts”. There was no real investment activity behind it. The daily “interest” paid to people who joined early came out of the principal of people who joined later: a textbook Ponzi scheme dressed up as forex.

Lion Group ran it with a well-organised multi-level machine: leaders recruiting in tiers, commissions paid by branch, award ceremonies in 5-star hotels, and photos of supercars and “monthly income” tables all over social media.

In the early stage, anyone could withdraw, and that was the organiser’s marketing cost: every person who got money out immediately became a “living witness” who went on to persuade friends and family.

The machine ran so smoothly that it drowned out even the loudest alarm.

A police warning lost to a screenshot

This is the most painful part of the file. The Ministry of Public Security and police in many provinces had issued public warnings about Lion Group / FX Trading Markets before the platform collapsed: the platform was not licensed by the State Bank of Vietnam, and the model showed signs of illegal multi-level fundraising.

The warnings sat on police websites, and newspapers reprinted them.

But they lost to something much simpler: a screenshot of a successful withdrawal in a Zalo group. Psychology calls this “social proof”: people trust 50 acquaintances showing off profits more than an official notice.

Whoever built Lion Group understood this well, so the whole system was designed to produce social proof every day: chat groups with thousands of members, deposit contests, weekly award ceremonies.

When a friend you trust invites you into a “deal” they are genuinely winning on, what warning can compete? Until the night all that social proof vanished at once.

The night the tap was shut

Approach, build trust, pile in the money, shut the tap. Lion Group went through all four familiar beats of every platform collapse, on a record scale.

Withdrawals started to slow down, blamed on a “partner bank”. Then a “system upgrade”. Then silence. The website faded out, and senior leaders vanished or announced “I am a victim too”, the classic line.

Participants took their complaints to the police; Ho Chi Minh City police received and verified a large number of complaints about fraudulent appropriation of property.

And at this point, the victims discovered a second harsh truth.

A 14-year prison sentence, but not for the people who ran the platform (updated 04/08/2026)

The People’s Court of Ha Tinh province sentenced Nghiem Van Hung (born 1996, Bac Ninh) to 14 years in prison for fraudulent appropriation of property. But Hung did not set up the platform. He scammed the platform’s own victims:

Hung posted in the “Lion Group” Facebook group, offering to recover money lost on FXT Trading Market. On 19/09/2022 he wrote, word for word: “Anyone who has lost money on the FXT Trading Market platform, inbox me and I will get it back for you”.

On 20/09/2022, one victim transferred 50 million dong up front. The victim was then pushed to borrow another 1.3–1.5 billion dong within 3 days, on a promise that the recovery would be done within 17 hours.

In total he appropriated about 2.6 billion dong from two victims (in Ha Tinh and Binh Dinh), between 03 and 09/2022.

Read the timeline carefully: the platform collapsed in June 2021, and the second scam happened in mid-2022, more than a year later.

The list of people who had lost money did not disappear with the platform. It became a customer list for the next round of fraud, and these people were targeted precisely because they had shown they were willing to transfer money.

The rule to take away applies to every platform collapse: after you lose money, anyone who contacts you first with a promise to get it back must be treated as a scammer until proven otherwise.

That holds even when they message you in the right victims’ group, name the right platform and seem to understand what happened. The only authority that can handle this is the police, and the police do not send you private messages asking you to pay a fee.

An escape route prepared since late 2020

This detail changes how you read the whole case. The platform stopped paying on 26/06/2021; by 28/06/2021 the website could no longer be reached.

At exactly that moment, the founder, Iker Phuong, real name Ho Ngoc Phuong, posted an “open letter” saying the Lion collective would “temporarily separate to go through a trial by fire together”, and that the platform had “officially paused operations”.

But the police had already warned of signs that this group had set up a new trading platform at sp500stock.com, registered anonymously in late 2020, with an interface and functions similar to FX Trading Markets.

Put the two dates side by side: the successor platform was registered in late 2020, and the platform collapsed in June 2021. The escape route was ready months before the “pause”.

A planned retreat is hard to call an accident, and it explains why the “open letter” used the word temporary.

This pattern repeats often enough to count as a warning sign in its own right; we wrote a separate article on it: forex platforms that change their name after being exposed, and how to spot the “shell swap”.

If you are weighing up a platform today, the practical question is not “will this platform collapse?” but “if it collapses, where will my money and the new domain go?”

A clear statement of limits: the details in this section come from press reports citing the authorities (see the sources). We could not independently verify who owns the domain sp500stock.com, and we draw no conclusion about the criminal liability of any individual beyond what the court has ruled.

Can the money be recovered?

A straight answer: it is extremely difficult.

Three reasons stack on top of each other. Many deposits went through intermediaries and bought an “internal token”, with no invoice and no document binding any legal entity to responsibility (a legal entity is the specific company named on the contract with you).

The money was moved through many layers over a long period before the collapse. And every transaction sat outside the protected legal framework, as explained in our article on the legal status of forex in Vietnam: a zone where, once a dispute arises, you have almost no tools to claim your rights.

The investigating authorities still do their job, and your complaint has value for the case file. File it anyway, with every piece of evidence you can gather.

But the real lesson lies in the future tense: with managed-account schemes that promise returns, the only sure way to “get your money back” is not to put it in at all. For that, you need to recognise them before you deposit.

Spotting the “new Lion Group” with five questions

Lion Group’s “descendants” keep appearing at a steady pace: new name, new interface, same insides.

Is there a promise of fixed daily or monthly returns? (0.5–3% a day, 20–30% a month.) YES = stop, no need to ask anything else. This is the fingerprint of a Ponzi scheme.

Is there an “expert trades for you, you just deposit” offer? The model separates you from your own money.

Are there multi-tier commissions for recruiting people? Real investments sell on performance; a Ponzi sells on recruitment.

Can you look up the legal entity plus a licence with any regulator? NO = a lottery ticket, not an investment.

How do they react when you ask to withdraw everything, principal and interest? This is the strongest one-question test, especially when someone close to you is inside such a system.

A real broker lets you withdraw without conditions; a Ponzi shows itself through an “unlock” fee, advice to “let the compounding run”, or endless delays. Do not argue with your relative. Let the test speak for itself.

Forty thousand people paid for the five-line checklist above to exist. If you really want to enter the forex market, with money in an account in YOUR own name, at a broker backed by a real regulator, the starting point is the guide for beginners and the broker ranking with licences checked.

That road is much slower than 1% a day. But it is real.

Spotted something inaccurate? Tell us and we will check it and publish a correction.