OJAS

But, according to the link which @ubonjoe has provided, the health insurance requirement at Phuket only applies to retirement extensions based on original non-OA visas issued since 2018. Hopefully that will still be the case after next September. At all other immigration offices this requirement applies to non-OA visas issued since the year dot.

The chances of an influx of Chinese tourists for the Lunar New Year (1st February 2022) are presumably zilch, then, in the light of your comments (the 2022 Winter Olympics will be taking place 4th - 20th February). In that case there would appear to be no undue hurry as far as they were concerned for another year at least - by which time the Thailand Pass will, all being well, have been consigned to history!

And, in any case, those who were responsible for designing this wretched system were, as I recall from the previous 72-page thread, German!

Well, had it dawned on the thick skulls of those "geniuses" who were responsible for designing this "wonderful" system to have incorporated a "status check feature" into it from the outset (instead of belatedly adding one now as an after-thought as part of a so-called "upgrade"), maybe - just maybe - the "duplicate applications" issue to which you refer might never have arisen - or certainly not to the extent which it did!

My understanding was that Phuket were an immigration office (possibly the only one in LOS?) who weren't enforcing the existing 40k/400k THB health insurance requirement for retirement extensions based on original non-OA visas. Whether that is likely to change from next September (if it hasn't done so already) remains to be seen, I think.

I strongly suspect that the responsibility for this unsatisfactory state of affairs more likely lies with those incompetent clowns called HMPO in the UK rather than with Key Visa. Constantly blaming the COVID pandemic for delays in issuing new passports, as they have been doing for the past 18 months or so, is IMHO now becoming an increasingly pathetic and tiresome excuse.

So presumably Wise didn't use Bangkok Bank as their partner bank in this particular instance? This should have guaranteed the coveted FTT coding had they done so.

I fear that you may well be right. Even those who have succeeded in obtaining approved 40k/400k THB policies might not find their insurers receptive to increasing the cover to 100k USD if need be, particularly if they have celebrated their 75th birthday in the meantime. And I strongly suspect that the principal beneficiaries of any concession allowing home country policies to be included in the eligibility reckoning would be Americans with long-established and generous private health insurance plans. Can't see many of us Brits who were reliant on the NHS to cater for our health needs when we were living in the UK benefitting from this!

In that case the border run option for scrubbing your original non-OA visa should work fine for you. Doubtful whether land borders will re-open for this purpose, though, at least until existing quarantining and testing requirements have eased somewhat - which, hopefully, will be some time within the next 15 years!????

This is the operative phrase, I think.

@Andrew Dwyer However what you should IMHO bear in mind with this option, particularly if you are aged 75+, is that you would almost certainly be faced with a 30-day 50k/100k USD insurance requirement in order to be able to re-enter Thailand visa-exempt after a border run, which you would probably find impossible to comply with because of your age (just as you would a 100k USD insurance requirement for retirement extensions based on an original non-OA visa, of course). I personally cannot see existing COE/TP insurance requirements being relaxed any time soon but instead becoming permanent. So, if a 100k insurance requirement for retirement extensions were to become mandatory for all original non-OA visa holders from September 2022, it strikes me that those aged 75+ would eventually have no legitimate option, in practice, other than to purchase one-way flight tickets back to their home countries unless they had an alternative reason (e.g. marriage to a Thai national) to fall back on to for future annual extensions. And since they would then in all certainty be faced with having to comply with some impossible (in their case) insurance requirement if they were ever subsequently minded to return to Thailand, this would, of course, be tantamount to a lifetime ban for them.

Wonder how many of these disgruntled patients are currently languishing in the hospital wing of the local equivalent of the Bangkok Hilton as a result of criminal defamation charges having been laid against them by the field hospital (which appears to have been named in the Daily News link). I look forward to reading a further Daily News report as to how they rate the meals being served up at that particular penal institution in comparison to those they received at the field hospital!????

I distinctly recall a report on here of my local office turning a blind eye in similar circumstances. However this strikes me as an inherently risky strategy from the overstayer's viewpoint as well in that, in the event of a subsequent regime change at their office, the incoming head honcho might not turn out to be quite so sympathetic to their plight (assuming that they were in an identical situation to the OP's pal) for precisely the reasons which you have mentioned.

Only an examination of the latest permission to stay stamp in his passport will enable this question to be answered definitively.

He might also have been eligible for 90-day medical extensions under para 2.25 of Police Order 327/2557 (see item 12 in the pinned thread at https://aseannow.com/topic/981135-laws-regulations-police-orders-etc/). But whether he has actually obtained any such extension is another matter.

Plus no guarantee of the coveted FTT/International Transfer coding either, I would have thought, if First Direct's/HSBC's agency/partner bank in Thailand is not Bangkok Bank (with whom @keithcresswell, I assume, holds his Thai bank account).

Are you sure that First Direct will allow you to open an account with them if you're a UK non-resident (as presumably you are)?

"Do you believe you will live to be One Hundred and Ten years Old?" Ask me again in 2059.

Merely a risk which those who opt for the "brown envelope" method run at their peril, I think.

But would a Dee Money invoice necessarily confirm the foreign origin of a particular transfer? And to digress slightly, might it be the case that Dee Money have now replaced the bank formerly known as TMB (whatever they may now be called) as a Wise partner?

The OP's question is as clear as mud to me. However, taking what he has said literally at face value, what he first needs to do IMHO is to apply to the Royal Thai Embassy in London for a non-immigrant visa of the OA or O variety for retirement. Full details of the Embassy's requirements are set out in the following link which includes a reference to the need for evidence of monthly income equalling at least 65k THB in the case of the non-OA visa:- https://london.thaiembassy.org/en/publicservice/84508-non-immigrant-visas

Or maybe they had all spent yesterday trying to register on the Thailand Pass website instead!

Time alone will tell, I think. It should not be forgotten that Wise are steadfastly refusing to provide a cast-iron guarantee that tagging will necessarily result in an FTT/International Transfer coding in all cases.

These can be found at many locations detailed in the following link (hopefully):- https://www.kasikornbank.com/en/branch/Pages/result.aspx?q=dummy&option=6&lat=13.724599&lng=100.6331106

£10,000 is rather on the high side for a test transfer IMHO. To check whether or not my BKKB account registrations on Wise had been tagged I initiated token transfers each of £100.