Thai woman claims cops and dealer stacked the deck

A Thai gambler accused police of conspiring with a card dealer to cheat her out of 800,000 baht during a gambling raid at a house in the Lat Krabang district of Bangkok.

The 37 year old gambler, May, hired a well-known lawyer, Ratchapon Sirisakhon, to seek justice for her. Accompanied by the lawyer, May came forward to expose the scam to the public in a press conference yesterday, July 29.

May explained that she met a woman aged about 50 at multiple gambling dens in Bangkok three to four months ago. The woman then invited her to play cards at her luxury home in the Lat Krabang district. She agreed and visited the house with six other friends.

The homeowner was the card dealer at all times while they gambled at her home. May and her friends came to the dealer’s home three to four times before the incident took place on June 10.

More than 30 police officers raided the house while they were gambling. She and six other friends were taken to the Lat Krabang Police Station. An officer said the card dealer’s daughter filed a complaint against them for cheating the dealer out of 10 million baht.

According to May, police ordered her and her friends to return money to the card dealer. Officers asked them to write down their bank account passwords on a piece of paper. Then, their money, a total of 2 million baht, was transferred to the homeowner. May only had 800,000 baht in her account and lost all of it.

Police’s clarification

Aside from losing their money, all of them were charged with illegal gambling. However, the dealer did not face any legal charges.

May talked to other gamblers and they agreed that the card dealer lost a maximum of 800,000 baht, not 2 million baht as she claimed. She also insisted that she and her friends had never cheated the dealer.

May and her friends felt they were treated unfairly and continued to appeal against the case. They later found that one of the police officers was a relative of the card dealer. She and her friends thought the dealer must have conspired with police to swindle their money.

A police officer, whose identity remains undisclosed, told INN News that what May stated was not true at all. Police did not arrest the card dealer because she and her daughter acted as spies to lead police to the arrest of the seven gamblers.

According to police, the card dealer and her daughter had the status of victims because they filed a fraud complaint against each of the gamblers before the day of the arrest.

Police also insisted that May and her six friends were scammers. Officers found a small camera installed in the hat of one of the gambling gangs proving their negative intentions and cheating behaviour.

Officers added that these seven suspects, led by a couple, planned the gambling method to swindle money from victims together and share the profits.