FIVE foreign fraudsters arrested in Thailand
Five foreign criminal suspects involved in four separate cases, including crimes relating to fraud and identity theft, have reportedly been caught by the Immigration Bureau (IB).
IB chief Pol Lt Gen Sompong Chingduang announced the cases in a press conference on Tuesday.
In the first case, Mohammad bin Qasim, a Pakistani, and Kuldip Singh, an Indian, were arrested in Samut Prakan and the Onnut area in Bangkok.
The men were accused of creating a Facebook page advertising a fake company that offered jobs in a Thai restaurant to unsuspecting job seekers.
Some of the job seekers traveled to Thailand for the advertised work, only to find that it did not exist.
The men allegedly met the victims at the airport and drove them to Chachoengsao. Along the way, the suspects robbed the victims of more than 100,000 baht in cash and took their mobile phones.
The suspects then threw away the victims’ luggage and their passports on June 25.
In another case, a Malaysian man identified as Yeoh was arrested and allegedly admitted to being hired by an online gambling firm to open 119 bank accounts in Thailand to deposit money sent by the website’s customers.
The firm is based in a neighbouring country, Pol Lt Gen Sompong said, adding that Mr. Yeoh paid people 3,000 baht each to open the bank accounts.
Mr. Yeoh himself received 150,000 baht a month for the job. He was recently apprehended in Sadao district of Songkhla.
In the third case, IB officers arrested a South Korean man named Dae Hung, who allegedly stole the identities of people in his home country and would use their information to make online purchases.
He would then return the purchased items and have the refunds sent back to his bank accounts, with damages estimated to exceed 1.9 million baht.
Mr. Dae had fled to Thailand from South Korea before he was captured.
In another case involving a South Korean, the IB apprehended a suspect identified only as Park, 59, who swindled a company in his own country out of more than 440 million won (about 10 million baht) before escaping to Thailand.
