I got alerted the other day by a friend of mine that runs a home food-delivery service that there is an increased amount of police checkpoints that are mostly targeting foreigners in and around the My An and My Khe areas. This is pretty easy for the coppers to accomplish because while there are quite a few roads in and out of this area including 7 bridges that lead to downtown, there are only a few mainly used roads in and out of these very popular expat areas.
While I do not drive myself, I don't see the point when a motorbike taxi is $1 and a car is $3 at most to go almost anywhere, I have known people for quite a while that have just been scooting by without a license and getting away with it for YEARS. Apparently, there is a big movement recently to get the unlicensed drivers off the road and into some (mostly financial) trouble.
You'll know it is a police checkpoint when you see it because there will be a couple of dudes, maybe more than that, wearing uniforms and they will have batons / billy clubs and they are going to wave you over to the side of the road. Some people have felt compelled to leg it at this point but trust me, this is almost always a bad idea to run away from the police in Vietnam. They may not pursue you, but they do have eyes and if they put your license plate number into a list, you are going to have to worry all the time about your bike simply getting taken when you are not with it. This seems to be how they handle people skipping out on police checkpoints without ever causing a scene and having crazy high-speed chases.
From what I understand, every neighborhood has a "boss" of sorts and that boss receives special treatment by the government in exchange for being the eyes and ears of that community. The people who violate the checkpoints get their number plates put on a list and when you see random people wandering around and checking out the number plates of all bikes in an area, that is what they are there for. I have been in a place when a guy all of a sudden just sat on a bike and got on a phone and about 20 minutes later a truck came by, the number plate was confirmed, and they just took the bike.
When this happens, your bike is just gone. I don't know how one would get the bike back, or even where you would go in order to make that happen. I would imagine there is a large fine and a track record of fines especially for ignoring a lawful order from a police officer that was waving you over. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that thought they got away with it, only to walk outside their house one day and then notice that their bike was simply gone.
A lot of people here that are visiting or are expats drive without a license and this is both understandable and also stupid. One of the reasons people drive without a license is because they don't have an international permit and once they are here the only workaround for that is to get a Vietnamese license and this is not allowed unless you have a TRC (temporary residence card) that is normally only given to people that have work permits. It is extremely difficult to get a work permit here due to the fact that there just aren't very many jobs outside of international education institutions and those jobs are few and far-between.
But I have also heard that if you are in your own country, obtaining these licenses is actually pretty easy to accomplish provided you have the necessary skills to drive a motorbike. It varies from place to place I guess.
One can get around needing a license, at least for the time being by virtue of getting an e-bike which has no CC rating because that's not how E-bikes work. You can't have any cubic centimeters on a non combustion engine.
As these e-bikes get faster and faster though, you can count on this loophole being closed before too long but the government just operates very slowly since their version of Congress only meets a couple of times a year. But count on it happening.
One thing that really surprises me is that the places that rent scooters will rent a bike to you whether or not you actually have a license and to me this seems like a gross dereliction of duty and there ought to be some sort of penalty for the companies that do something like this.
At the moment all of the foreigners that are driving without licenses are kind of scrambling to transition to e-bikes and now those sorts of shops are popping up all over town. The reason why I think the "door will be closed on this soon" is because of the fact that of the half dozen or so of shops of this sort that exist near where I live, most of them are owned by foreigners and more specifically they are owned by Russians. Lately, the Russian people have been getting a lot of bad press here in Vietnam because of the bad actions of a few apples that are spoiling the pot.
Just be aware that if you are living or visiting here, that they actually DO enforce the road rules here despite the fact that the streets seem to be a lawless and chaotic free-for-all.