Time is up: Fake luxury watch scam busted in Bangkok condo

Police arrested a foreign couple at their condominium on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok for selling fake luxury watches that caused 12 million baht in damage.

Mueang Thong Thani Immigration Bureau in the central province of Nonthaburi reported the successful arrest of the foreign couple yesterday, July 3. According to the officers, the arrest warrants were issued against the couple, a Kazakh man and a Chinese woman, on March 21, but the date of their arrest was not made public.

Immigration Bureau officers reported that a luxury watch agent filed a complaint with Thong Lo Police Station officers that the 32 year old Kazakh man, Alcus, and his 38 year old Chinese girlfriend, Billy, tricked him into buying counterfeit designer brand watches with fake certificates of authenticity.

The agent explained that Alcus and Billy informed him that they would pay him US$800 (about 29,000 baht) in commission for each watch if he could sell them. The agent then offered the watches, worth 12 million baht, to a watch shop and transferred the watch’s payment to the foreign couple.

The owner of the shop later discovered that the watches were counterfeit, as were the certificates, and filed a complaint against the agent. The agent agreed to compensate the shop and then filed a complaint against the couple who had deceived him.

Officers found the couple had relocated from their former accommodation to hide in a condo in the Sukhumvit neighbourhood and arrested them. The Kazakh man and Chinese woman were charged with conspiring to commit fraud by deceiving another person with a false statement or concealing the truth. The penalty is imprisonment of up to three years, a fine of up to 60,000 baht, or both according to Section 341 of the Criminal Law.

In a related report, another couple, a Pakistani man and a Thai woman, were arrested in May for the murder of an Indian man in the southern province of Songkhla.

The three allegedly argued over their businesses, leading the couple to lure the Indian man into travelling with them before killing him and abandoning his body on the roadside.