Thailand Investigations Blog
Do You Want to Know the Truth?

A few months ago, I handled a case where a client wanted me to do a background check on his Thai girlfriend. He did not think she was cheating on him with another man though, he just wanted to know whether a business opportunity she was offering him was legit. Apparently he and his girl had been together for about a little more than a year, and she had approached him with a number of business plans she said would help them be better established in the country.

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They had met in a bar he said, but the girl was not a prostitute, in fact, they met at a rather upper-class establishment. According to my client, his girlfriend was a successful businesswoman who had several investments in various industries and some small business ventures.

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While my client was by no means wanting, at least financially, he found it prudent to consult someone more familiar with the ins and out of scams and the like here in Thailand. After all, my line of work has made me very knowledgeable about the kinds of modus operandi people here use to fool unsuspecting expats, who are blinded by love and unfamiliar with the local territory.

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He showed me the supposed business proposal, and some documents his girlfriend supplied him with. His girlfriend had proposed setting up a travel agency and a restaurant in a particularly popular district of Bangkok, and the documents were supposedly addresses of potential office spaces and other logistics that would of course require money—a very sizable amount, in fact.

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So I took the case, and promised that I would look into it. I found out that this woman was not who she said she was. It turns out that this woman was a former sex worker, who had scammed her way up that she could afford to appear as a successful businesswoman with various investments in different ventures all around town. She would scope out potential victims in a bar, and would use her skills to catch an unsuspecting man. She would stay with him for a little more than a year to establish some trust and intimacy, and then she would propose a business deal. Backed by bogus documents, she would solicit a vast amount of money from her victim and vanish without a trace. My client was almost her 4th victim. It was a well thought out plan, which required a great deal of patience, but the rewards for her were much higher than simply continuing to be a call girl and scam tourists. She was smart, and took it to a higher level.

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Many westerners make the mistake of underestimating the intelligence of many of the women here. She used that as an advantage, and had my client not been prudent enough to consult me regarding this supposed business deal, he would have found himself in dire financial straits.

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Remember that scammers don’t only exist in the lower echelons of society, there are bigger snakes up in the social ladder, and their bite is bigger, deeper, and much more poisonous.

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Tags: scam