Scammers in Thailand: Sometimes they are the foreigners
I recall when I first got here that I was approached by so many people with various propositions, many of which were easily identified as scams and several scams that I was actually victimized by. The ones that happened to me weren't that bad and I didn't suffer much losses because of it. One of them, by the time the deed was done, I kind of admired the tact of the man that pulled it off because he had worked on his con that he pulled off on me for many hours only to relieve me of around $100. There are far more devious fraudsters out there though.
A lot of people become rather distrusting of Thai people after living here for a while and this is unfortunate because there are going to be a lot of innocent people that are presumed to be fraudsters that actually aren't because of the high level of distrust that ends up happening to people that have been burned by a con-man.
This isn't a new thing, but a recent high-profile bust has shown that there are quite a few non Thai fraudsters that operate in this country as well and the organizations that they work for likely employ them to prey on the people like my friends who will have nothing to do with a Thai person that they do not know. The foreigners tend to take higher-priced con jobs, or so it would appear and a recent one for nearly 20,000,000 THB (about $580,000) that was nearly successful has shined a light on the fact that there are people of all nationalities in Thailand that are looking to cheat you out of your money.
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In this particular case it is especially bad because the people that this person was defrauding were people that he had known for a long time and presumably had their trust. He had a Thai company, a legal one, but then claimed that he had lost the company ownership documents and after a lengthy process, he was able to obtain a new one and since the document numbers were different, he was able to secure new business partners as investors promising them that they could have long-term visas as an investor and a member of the board. While the specifics of what he has done are not released because this is a pending case, I do know from friends of mine that bringing on investors for longer visas is actually a very common thing in Thailand. There is nothing illegal about this and it is a common practice.
How he managed to scam people worked like this:
A company has a certain level of assets that are registered to it and parts of this company can be sold to various investors in exchange for a board seat. Normally these are "silent partners" who are putting trust in the company's management to make money but they do not have any rights to dictate how the company is run. Basically, it's the same as buying shares in Microsoft or something like that. You trust that the company is well-run enough that your investment is safe and is going to grow in value.
Nothing wrong with that right? Well, there is something very wrong with it when the assets that you are telling people they can buy a piece of are already registered to someone else, in this case the original shareholders who had no idea that he was re-selling the things that they legally own. The real owners became suspicious when they noticed strangers walking around the various company properties as "if they owned the place." Which, to be fair to the new people, they thought that they did.
How is this possible? Well, I don't want to bash anyone here, but a lot of Thailand's government still relies very heavily on paperwork and certain unscrupulous members of the government, will knowingly issue documents that they know to not be genuine for a certain amount of "under the table" money. They can always claim ignorance later because the unique serial numbers on these documents don't normally have a tie-in to the old, original documents.
To give you an easier and more widespread example of this we need go back only around 5 years when Thailand based all immigration records on someone's passport number. If you had received what Thailand had dictated was "too many" visas in one passport, you only needed to make a trip back to your home country, get a new passport with a new number on it (which is the standard method in my country since they will NOT issue you one with the same number in it) and when you would return to Thailand they would have no idea that you had ever been there before. This has since been rectified to some degree by adding biometrics to everyone's entry and exit. What this guy did was essentially the same thing but with much higher stakes.
I kind of admire the Thai police on this one because instead of swarming the company headquarters and missing their chance, they waited until the Brit, known now only as Quentin, returned from the UK to Thailand and busted him upon re-entering the country. Had they acted rashly, he could have simply remained away from Thailand and would have never faced consequences for what he has done.
The problem here is that while Quentin will go down and likely get some huge fines and some jail time, the people who got duped by him are very unlikely to get their money back because the things that they "bought" from Quentin already belong to other people: The police can't simply confiscate it and give it to the new investors.
While I am sure there are a lot of people out there that probably would operate with due diligence anyway, it is always a good idea in Thailand to not believe anything that sounds too good to be true. There are legitimate investment opportunities in this country that can, indeed, lead to long term visas. But if you are going to do that, just know that there are a lot of nefarious people out there and the only way you can be sure is if you state that you are going to have your own lawyer look over the paperwork. If the person shies away from this idea, you need to walk away.
What really should be done here is that the Department of Business Development and the Land Department, which issued the new documents to Quentin in the first place, needs to be investigated as well because I would imagine that someone in there got paid a lot of money to alter documents they are not meant to alter. I would bet that whoever did that dirty deed is truly sweating in his boots right now.