44YO Thai Woman Scammed Over 20 S’pore & Japanese Retirees of S$1.3M

By
Avery
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Move over, Nigerian prince. There’s a new scam in town. 

Welcome to the Thai tourism scam, and at least 20 Singaporean and Japanese retirees have fallen for it, losing at least S$1.3 million in total.

44YO Thai Woman Scammed Over 20 S’pore & Japanese Retirees of S$1.3M

As Lianhe Zaobao reports, the mastermind behind the scam is a 44-year-old Thai woman, whom we’ll call Warinthorn, who runs a tourism business with her Japanese husband in Chiang Mai, Thailand. 

When the business started flailing, the couple started getting ideas. They invited retirees to participate in a business visa extension programme, before persuading them to invest in their company at a claimed rate of return of 5% to 10%.

Come on, if you want to scam people, at least promise them 500% or something.

The victims were required to have at least 800,000 Baht (S$34,000) in their bank accounts, and obviously, they received a rate of return of -100%.

The couple magically disappeared last November, after claiming they “couldn’t access the cash”. 

Yeah, maybe because you spent it all already.

Anyway, when the victims realised the couple had evaporated from their registered addresses, the police became involved. The Thai Tourist Police Bureau promptly issued arrest warrants for Warinthorn, who was apprehended on April 3.

Further investigations are ongoing. 

Scams Rampant

The poor retirees are hardly the only ones who saw their hard-earned money disappear.

According to Channel NewsAsia, 2020 saw a total of more than 15,700 scam cases, with more than $201 million lost to the most popular forms of scams. 

This represents a significant increase compared to previous years, forming 42.1% of total crime cases reported, in contrast to 27.2% in 2019. Online scams, in particular, were prevalent last year as Singaporeans turned to online purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More specifically, e-commerce scams, social media impersonation scams, loan scams, and banking related scams were marked by the police to be of “particular concern”, making up 68.1% of the 10 most common scam types last year.

Investment scams, however, cheated the most money from victims, costing close to $70 million from more than 1,100 cases.

How Not To Be Scammed

To make sure your money is spent on your Lazada cart and not charitably donated to some scammer’s struggle affording their second Bentley, here are some things you can do, courtesy of the Singapore Police Force.

To prevent falling for e-commerce scams, you should visit only credible platforms with reliable customer protection policies, or insist that your payment only be made after you have received the goods as advertised. 

Be careful, too, of deals that look unreasonably attractive—the only thing unreasonably attractive might be you to the scammer.

For social media impersonation scams, the Police advise not to disclose internet banking account details or any one-time passwords you receive with anyone, since they will never be required for legitimate purposes. 

You might have also received messages claiming to offer loans at attractive interest rates—well, you guessed it, those are scams too.

Advertisements by financial institutions through SMS are, in fact, prohibited, and any you encounter might only land you in further financial trouble. They might, for example, require you to transfer some money as a deposit, and then walk away.

It’s always better not to be scammed in the first place. However, you have been scammed, try not to panic and report the crime to the Police immediately: if you are lucky, you might still get your money back.

The Police Anti-Scam Centre is dedicated to frustrating scams and recovering monetary losses, and has been able to reclaim about $3.7 million of losses since its founding in 2019.

And it’s even better not to scam anyone, in case you get ideas.

Featured Image: 9nong / Shutterstock.com

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Avery
Email: [email protected]