Sounds like the typical scams pulled by Nigerians who are increasingly using China and Thailand as operational bases.

In your next life, you will be a Nigerian, a rather, classy well educated, upright and rich Nigerian.

A certain global huge 'upright' western bank was fined $13B for fraud this week selling dodgy safe securities.

If you must scam, wear nice suit, be born white, have huge nice offices, pay your taxes , sponsor US open. Then sell crap labelled whatever.

Thieving parasites are everywhere and this typical scheme of extracting money from suckers is perrenial. One mystery to me is how do these germs get and choose the victim's phone number? Is it given to them and by whom or is it just a random call? The latter seems unlikely as the majority of home phone people are house wives etc. Imagine the cost of the calls made by the scammers if random calls are made. Anyway the victim in this case acted without caution, as he also did by going to Chiang Mai, and therefore cannot claim to be entirely blameless. The documentry was however well done and well edited.

Its elderly people i feel sorry for .They can be more trusting to a "friendly" voice on the phone .

Different scenario ,but a Tennant in my 85 year old Fathers house robbed his cheque book .The guy tried to cash a large amount with a cheque at a local bank back in Dublin .The teller became suspicious and luckily the Bank alerted my Father .