Foreigner and Thai member of ATM fraud gang arrested

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ATM DUPING GANG

Iranian and Thai men arrested

By The Nation

BANGKOK: -- Three more suspected members of an overseas call centre gang duping people into transferring their funds via ATMs to them have been arrested, police said yesterday.

The gang reportedly convinced some 1,000 people to open bank accounts for their criminal use.

Victims of the gang were urged to file police complaints.

Pol Lt Gen Thangai Prasjaksattru, commissioner of the Central Investigation Bureau, told a press conference yesterday that Iranian national Martin Arami, 37, and two Thai men - Charoenchai Kitpimonkul, 31, and Aidech Oanurak, 54 - were nabbed on Monday along with 19 ATM cards, Bt270,000 cash and three cell phones.

The three were charged with defrauding the public and using others' electronic cards to damage other persons or the public.

They were implicated by Taiwanese gang member Sia Yong Thong, who was caught while withdrawing money from a ATM in a Pathum Wan shopping mall on February 4.

Since Arami's bank accounts saw Bt47 million in activity over the past 12 months, police would move to seize his assets under the Anti-Money Laundering Act.

As for the two woman accomplices identified as Maleechan Lakhon and Pranom Saemo, who remain at large, police had already requested for their arrest warrants.

The police investigation found that the gang had set up a call centre abroad to randomly phone Thai residents via the Internet and tell them that they had debt problems that needed checking or they had received tax refunds.

The gang then talked the victims into going to a ATM and exploited their English illiteracy to have the victims use English instructions to unknowingly transfer money to the gang.

The gang had already hired up to 1,000 locals to open bank accounts for a Bt1,500-Bt2,500 payment and then hand the gangsters the ATM cards for the accounts so they could withdraw the victims' money.

Those opening the accounts should file a police complaint or else they would be charged with conspiring with the gang to defraud the public, Thangai said.

He also warned people not to believe anyone calling to ask them to do something involving a ATM because such action was not required by any state office or commercial bank.

-- The Nation 2010-02-10

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[Portlandstone]

Either this article isn't written clearly enough, or I just have a really low ability to understand articles of this nature in any newspaper that describe how "thousands" are easily duped by criminals. Completely surreal. Is today April 1st?

Reminds me of some articles I was reading in Vietnam's "newspapers" last year. One of the scams people were tricked into was a foreign national telling a local that this bag has millions of dollars in US money but it is currently unusuable because it is all dyed blue. However if you pay me $1000 I will sell you the chemical required to dissolve the blue dye and you'll have millions. Another one was a guy going around selling a "$1,000,000 US bill" that could be yours for only $1,000. But then the Vietnamese are never clear about much of anything when they talk, so I couldn't understand if the articles were real or if they were conspired basically to rile up sentiments about foreigners in general (no doubt, true to some extent because scams going the other way are a daily occurance).

[TAWP]

The ink-scam is real and so is this phone-pay-over-ATM-scam.

People have been tricked by even less clever dupes.