From Fraud to Auction Block: Vietnamese Tycoon's Luxury Handbags Sell for Half a Million

When property developer Truong My Lan asked a court to return her rare albino Birkin bags, she framed them as“mementos”— precious keepsakes she wanted her family to hold onto. One she’d purchased in Italy. The other, she claimed, was a gift. The court apparently disagreed. On Thursday, those two Hermes handbags walked out of a Ho Chi Minh City auction house with new owners and a price tag of over $500,000 combined.

The sale is the latest chapter in one of Vietnam’s most explosive corruption sagas. Truong My Lan was convicted in 2024 of orchestrating a massive fraud at Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) — a bank prosecutors say she controlled — that siphoned roughly $27 billion and left tens of thousands of everyday investors devastated. She was initially sentenced to death, but after Hanoi abolished capital punishment for certain crimes, now faces life in prison instead. The handbags? Just collateral.

A Hermes bag adorned with white gemstones fetched 11.6 billion Vietnamese dong ($440,000) at auction Thursday, while a second bag sold for 2.5 billion dong ($95,000). The proceeds go toward victim compensation. So far, Lan has paid more than 12 trillion dong ($455 million) to bondholders — money that came from seized assets like these luxury pieces and, soon, three vehicles: a Maybach, a BMW, and a Lexus scheduled for auction Friday.

What makes this story resonate isn’t just the jaw-dropping numbers or the image of a disgraced tycoon watching her luxury goods vanish under the gavel. It’s the real people behind it all. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese citizens invested their savings in SCB, betting on growth and security. When the scheme unraveled, they lost everything — and their anger was rare enough in Vietnam’s political climate to spark actual public protests. The auction of Lan’s Hermes bags is, in a sense, symbolic justice: her extravagance being liquidated to repay the ordinary people she betrayed. Whether the funds will ever fully restore what was lost is another question entirely.