BANGKOK — Thai police announced Wednesday that they had arrested an international gang who operated call centers to deceive elderly Americans into sending them money. They reportedly raked in more than 3 billion Thai baht ($87million).
Police claimed they had arrested 21 suspects Tuesday after raiding nine locations across four provinces of Thailand. They seized 162 bank accounts, six mobile phones and two cars as well as multiple real estate assets. On Wednesday, another suspect from Thailand was detained. The raids were carried out by U.S. agents.
Five Indian nationals and fifteen Thais were charged with fraud by impersonating other people, involvement in transnational crimes, fraud by inputting false information into computers that causes damage, money laundering, and conspiring to launder funds.
Police claimed that the scammers claimed they were law enforcement agents looking into money laundering. They told victims their funds were suspicious and needed to be transferred to them for verification. They claimed that the suspects had also hack into computers of victims, a common tactic.
Police said that the victims were mostly elderly and included dentists, doctors, soldiers, businesspeople, and professors.
Undercover investigators tracked the money of the gang and discovered it was being laundered through Chonburi province’s restaurants and gold shops. It is located 78 miles southeast from Bangkok. This area is known for being a haven for foreign criminal gang members.
According to police, the syndicate was headed by Indians who had assets in Thailand, Cambodia and Singapore, Malaysia as well as Hong Kong, Hong Kong, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Peru, and Poland.
After similar crimes in 72,000 cases were discovered to have resulted in more than $3 billion in losses, U.S. Secret Service and FBI agents alerted Thai police about the activities of the gang, police stated.
