2 Restaurant Owners in Thailand Have Been Sentenced to 723 Years’ Imprisonment Each for Fraud

Do you like getting scammed?

Rhetorical question, please don’t answer it.

It always sucks when someone swindles you and gets away with it.

While we don’t wish for hurt, we at least hope for some kind of due recompense for the scammer’s crimes.

Sure, you shouldn’t have believed you won a million bucks from a lottery you never entered, but you still want justice.

So if you’ve been a scam victim, today’s story might bring a smile to your face.

Restaurant In Thailand

But first, we have to travel over the seas to Thailand.

Last year, the Laemgate seafood restaurant started selling various food vouchers that required customers to pay in advance.

And their discounts were ridiculous.

One of the deals supposedly had a 10-person voucher for only around S$39.55!

I would say that’s an obvious warning flag but you can’t stop a man from their discounts.

Naturally, people would want to claim their vouchers ASAP but the number of people on the waiting list was huge.

Like, months of booking in advance kind of huge.

Well, when you have up to 20000 people purchasing your stuff, you kind of expect this to happen.

In total, they earned around S$2.25 million from this.

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Food Fraud

But sometimes, deals are too good to be true. Reality is often disappointing.

Around March the same year, the company, Laemgate Infinite, announced its closure.

Apparently they “could not get hold of enough seafood to meet the demand.” There we go, warning flag 2.

Still, things looked to be okay when the company still attempted to issue refunds for customers.

Sadly, among the 818 who complained, around 375 got their refund.

But it didn’t take too long for even more of them to pile up, with some straight-up reporting the company for fraud.

The owners, Apichart Bowornbancharak and Prapassorn Bowornbancha, were eventually arrested. Their charges included defrauding the public through false messages.

Centuries Of Service

You may have read the title already, but it was actually even crazier than that.

The owners would be found guilty of 723 counts of fraud and were understandably sentenced to jail.

Only the initial sentence was 1446 years of jail each.

All of a cat’s nine lives can’t even match this jail term.

The two owners pleaded real hard against this, of course, and their sentence was cut…

…in half and into 723 years each.

While this is true and extremely insane, the Thai law also has a maximum of 20 years for public fraud.

So if you were seriously expecting a nine-lives jail time, you’re probably a little disappointed now.

Their company still got fined over S$80,880 though and the co-owners and the company was ordered to refund over S$112,330 to victims.

They might not be stuck behind bars forever, but the owners are definitely coming out to no cash.

An ironic end for a scamming company.