Thailand Investigations Blog
Do You Want to Know the Truth?

This is a true story of how a simple background check could have saved Arnold and his friends. The names have been changed. I’m splitting this story into two parts to give you a detailed retelling of events.

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Arnold (not his real name) had known Jenny (not her real name) for about four years or so. They were not friends at the beginning – they simply met at social gatherings for businessmen and it so happened that Arnold knew the guy the Jenny was dating at that time.

Of course, as time passed, they go to know each other better and became good friends. Arnold wasn’t exactly rich, but he knew how to take care of his money and spend wisely, which was why he had a considerable amount of money put away. But let’s get back to the story. Jenny was an executive at an international bank in Thailand and Arnold was a manager at the Thailand office of an international firm.

When Jenny first approached Arnold with the idea of setting up a business between her, himself, Tod, her then fiancé, and a number of other investors, Arnold wasn’t quite sure. After all, it would require him to take a hefty chunk of money out of his nest egg, which he had conscientiously fed – every paycheck saw a sizable amount of money automatically go into his savings. What Jenny was proposing was an import business, where they would import certain electronics like TVs and the like, and sell them to local suppliers in Thailand. Jenny presented complete documents and said that she had a contact at the docks who would facilitate the whole business.

Well, Arnold thought, Jenny was someone he knew for four years, and he also knew the other people who were going into the business with them, who were also old friends of theirs. Jenny proposed a 20% return on investment, with her handling everything. And with Arnold’s busy schedule and all, just handing over the money and letting Jenny do all the logistics was a perfect arrangement. So with that last straw, Arnold finally gave in.

It was good for the first couple of months, as returns were high, and Arnold believed that he and his friends had stumbled upon a good and lucrative business. Everything changed though, when Jenny suddenly announced one day that her contact at the docks had run away with their invested money and they had no goods. First he gave her the benefit of the doubt, but a number of their other friends were immediately suspicious and hired my firm to investigate the matter. We easily found out that Jenny had been running a scam, a Ponzi scheme – where the investor’s money was being used to pay them, and no actual business was going on, with Jenny siphoning off a significant amount of money to offshore accounts. We also found out that she had be embroiled in a similar case in her home country (without the knowledge of her bosses, of course), and used her appointment to Thailand as a means to escape the people pursuing her. The case was just about to reach the bosses when Jenny started the whole scheme and asked Arnold and co. to join her in her “business”.