TallGuyJohninBKK

I have a BKK Bank account, and AFAIK, haven't received any communication from them as yet on the 50K transfers issue and photo identification deal. They have paper photocopies of my current passport, which has my photo and signature on the main page. And they may even have past electronic scans of my prior passport. But nothing more than that AFAIK.

There's two ways of approaching that, depending on the person's situation. One is to have the spouse listed as a formal co-accountholder on the account. The one situation where you clearly don't want to do that is if the person is using the account to satisfy Thai Immigration's 400K or 800K deposit requirement, where they basically want solo account holders. The other is to have the spouse listed on the Thai bank book as a kind of silent co-accountholder. The titling of the account on the main page of the bank book remains the same and unchanged. But they add the wife's name elsewhere in the bank book in a way that the bank staff can see, if the need arises. That won't cause any problems with Thai Immigration. But of course, either way, I think Jim's advice above is good advise, about alerting the Thai spouse to the lay of the land legally, and that if you should pass at some point, they should immediately take your bank debit card and withdraw the funds from the account, or even transfer the funds via online banking, if the spouse can know the details for that. And not sit around waiting weeks or months, and having to go to the expense of hiring a Thai attorney to go to court, just to access funds in your bank account.

The problem is, as JimGant alluded to above, this being Thailand, you can never quite know how a bank / bank manager at any given branch is going to respond when you walk in the door with your amphur will. Will they accept it as the basis for releasing the funds. Or, will they tell you they won't release the funds unless you have the will run thru the Thai courts' probate process. I've heard of both responses being provided by Thai banks at different places at different times.

I've never heard of the US Embassy in Thailand having the practice of in advance accepting and recording Americans' wills and executor designations. That was the advice you got from a (Thai?) attorney. Have you actually tried to accomplish that as yet with the US Embassy?

Most of the bulk food additives here seem to be imported from China.... https://กรุงเทพเคมี.com/index.php?route=common/home OR https://www.tfac-shop.com/ Those are two sellers I'm familiar with in the BKK area.

As I mentioned above, after using them steadily for several years, I've now stopped using PE entirely... because starting since last fall, any packages I send with them via their airmail service have a better than even chance of never arriving to me... and no way to track down how or why. And that's, inexplicably, after sending more than 300 packages with them thru the years and never having one go missing.... until things went south starting last fall. Perhaps I got a new Customs staff assigned to handle the incoming packages headed for my address....like the following:

Well, at least he wasn't a fake Nigerian prince or a fake U.S. Army general... Thailand's had a lot of those going round....

All of the OP is a pretty clear violation of Thailand's computer crimes law, including its prohibition against posting sexual content online. The laggard response of the local police in Samut Prakan pretty well shows that crimes against women here, especially involving those by men in current or past relationships, often tend to receive scant attention and priority from police.

When the bank says they're not requiring it yet of foreigners, I believe that translates as, the bank in question has yet to set up technology systems to implement the new requirement for foreign account holders.

So does that mean they weren't beaten with telephone books, suffocated with plastic bags over their heads, or disemboweled and then dumped into some nearby river?

The cross dressing deal not likely to go over well back in his home country.....

In Thailand's case, it tells me that they're more interested in resurrecting their tourism industry and downplaying COVID than they are better protecting the health of their citizens. As the WHO wrote in their most recent global update: "Reported cases are not an accurate representation of infection rates due to the reductions in testing and reporting globally." For me at least, the fact that certain countries have decided to downplay the real, ongoing presence of COVID doesn't change the underlying reality that it remains an ongoing health risk. Per the WHO: "Globally, over 1.2 million new cases and over 7100 deaths were reported in the last 28 days (22 May to 18 June 2023)." https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/weekly-epidemiological-update-on-covid-19---22-june-2023 Thailand is no longer reporting just COVID infections to the WHO, even during recent periods when MoPH doctors were estimating the country was experiencing 20,000 to 40,000 new COVID infections per day. From late May: "a warning yesterday from Dr. Nitipat Jiarakul, chief of the Division of the Respiratory Diseases and Tuberculosis at the Faculty of Medicine at Siriraj Hospital, that COVID-19 is staging a comeback, with as many as 20,000-40,000 people being infected each day, about 20 times more than the rate of infection in April." https://www.thaipbsworld.com/siriraj-hospitals-icu-and-ipd-fully-occupied-with-covid-19-patients/

Yes, which as the WHO report explains, they consider to be an indicator that fewer and fewer countries are actively testing for and publicly reporting their COVID cases. Thailand is an example among such countries, as Thailand last fall entirely stopped publicly reporting mere COVID cases / positive tests / infections, and since that time has only reported "cases" that are in fact hospitalizations.

But we know COVID remains much more fatal than the flu even now, just as it has been throughout the COVID pandemic, although the gap has been narrowing somewhat lately: April 6, 2023 Risk of Death in Patients Hospitalized for COVID-19 vs Seasonal Influenza in Fall-Winter 2022-2023 ... "The death rate at 30 days was 5.97% for COVID-19 and 3.75% for influenza, with an excess death rate of 2.23% (95% CI, 1.32%-3.13%) (Figure). "However, the difference in mortality rates between COVID-19 and influenza appears to have decreased since early in the pandemic; death rates among people hospitalized for COVID-19 were 17% to 21% in 2020 vs 6% in this study, while death rates for those hospitalized for influenza were 3.8% in 2020 vs 3.7% in this study.1 And that being vaccinated reduces one's odds of dying from COVID: "The increased risk of death was greater among unvaccinated individuals compared with those vaccinated or boosted—findings that highlight the importance of vaccination in reducing risk of COVID-19 death." https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2803749

The global look at COVID things in the most recent update from the WHO: "Globally, over 1.2 million new cases and over 7100 deaths were reported in the last 28 days (22 May to 18 June 2023)." "Reported cases are not an accurate representation of infection rates due to the reductions in testing and reporting globally." "The highest numbers of new 28-day deaths were reported from Brazil (978 new deaths; -19%), Spain (729 new deaths; +70%), the Russian Federation (577 new deaths; -13%), Australia (496 new deaths; -6%), and Italy (420 new deaths; -36%)" https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/weekly-epidemiological-update-on-covid-19---22-june-2023

From the AP: "Four agencies still believe the virus was transferred from animals to humans, and two agencies — the Energy Department and the FBI — believe the virus leaked from a lab. The CIA and another agency have not made an assessment." Also: "the report says U.S. intelligence “has no information, however, indicating that any WIV genetic engineering work has involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely-related enough to have been the source of the pandemic.” https://apnews.com/article/covid19-united-states-intelligence-china-23dcbde0be5638556739b564ece97027

For the latest COVID update from the Thai Ministry of Public Health, this is their breakdown of the Thai provinces with the most new COVID hospitalizations for the week June 18-24 (via Google Translate). https://ddc.moph.go.th/covid19-dashboard/?dashboard=province Because these are raw numbers and not per capita rates, Bangkok is always going to lead this list because it has far and away larger population than any other province, and its number of new COVID hospitalizations declined slightly from the prior week. But it's a bit surprising to see the 2nd ranked province as Ubon Ratchathani in the NE... even though the province's numbers of new COVID hospitalizations also declined from the prior week. Nonthaburi and Samut Sakhon are adjoining Bangkok, so they've often been high on the provinces list, as has been Chonburi, because of its high tourist population, although Chonburi's new COVID hospitalization numbers declined by about 50% from the prior week. Surin also showed a similar major decline in new hospitalizations. Over the past two weekly periods, the numbers of new COVID hospitalizations increased in the following provinces including Nonthaburi, Samut Sakhon and Songkhla Here's the comparable breakdown by province for the prior week, June 11-17:

When any of those kill 15-20 million people over the past of several years as COVID has done, I can assure you, they'd get my equal attention. But of course, they haven't, so your comment above is meaningless. From The Economist, updated in current time: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates From the WHO just for the years 2020 and 2021: 14.9 million excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 https://www.who.int/news/item/05-05-2022-14.9-million-excess-deaths-were-associated-with-the-covid-19-pandemic-in-2020-and-2021

COVID has been one of the top leading causes of death in the world over the past several years during the duration of the pandemic, usually exceeding everything except heart disease and cancer.

COVID hospitalizations and deaths in Thailand March 26 to April 1, 2023 June 18 to 24, 2023 https://www.facebook.com/informationcovid19/photos

But none of that means that their deaths were not caused by COVID....which in fact they were. Lots of people walking around the world, and indeed posting here on this forum, who are older, have so-called comorbidities, etc., and most of them likely will continue living for many years.... absent some extraordinary event like a COVID pandemic coming along.

Except to those who are still dying from COVID and ending up hospitalized with it.... and their friends, families, etc. For the past week in Thailand, June 18-24: --1,653 new hospitalizations due to COVID --36 deaths due to COVID --265 patients currently hospitalized in serious condition due to COVID --164 COVID hospitalized patients unable to breathe and thus currently requiring intubation Thus far in 2023, 27,645 total hospitalizations due to COVID, and 659 COVID deaths. https://ddc.moph.go.th/covid19-dashboard/ In short, no, the current levels of COVID deaths and hospitalizations are not as high as they were earlier in the pandemic. But that also doesn't mean the health risks and burdens associated with the pandemic have entirely disappeared, because as the chart above clearly shows, they have not. By comparison to the latest weekly numbers above, the comparable figures for Thailand at the beginning of this past April were 3 COVID deaths and 167 COVID hospitalizations. So current COVID hospitalizations and deaths in Thailand right now are running about TEN times higher than at the beginning of April.

And is too often the case with Thai news reports, absolutely no mention of the custody status or location of the key suspects.... Who from this report, seem to have been previously arrested on related charges. And no explanation of why the police are only executing search warrants now.... as opposed to when the couple were originally arrested.

WSA guarantees that the only price you'll pay is their flat weight-based rates... So if someone at Thai Customs is having a bad hair day, that's between Customs and WSA...and doesn't involve me the end customer. Also, unlike the other shippers mentioned above, WSA isn't sending individual packages, AFAIK. They're aggregating packages from different of their customers into large shipping containers, and sending them by air or ship en masse. I suspect, those get a different kind of Customs oversight vs the individual packages sent directly via USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc.

I had no problem finishing 12 oz of prime rib... and a slice of chocolate ice cream cake to boot! But then, I'm a TALL guy! ???? Need my sustenance.... especially after having been gone from U.S. dining for the prior FOUR years!!!!