Thailand and Cambodia will sign MOU to crack down on call centre scams

A Thai government spokesman has announced that Thailand and Cambodia plan to sign an MOU together soon to crack down on call centre scams. The spokesman said the Police Cyber Taskforce recently raided the operational base of a network of four gambling websites in Nonthaburi. He said the network had more than 200,000 clients with 200 million baht a month in circulation.

In the past year, Thailand and Cambodia have cooperated to arrest of as many as 6,348 suspects, in 5,517 cases. They have arrested the owners of 344 bank accounts, and closed down 742 URLs. The websites were blamed for causing damages worth 157 million baht to Thais.

The spokesman says PM Prayut has told government agencies concerned to launch awareness campaigns to educate people on how to spot scams. He said the Digital Economy and Society Ministry had also integrated its operations with other government agencies to suppress call-centre gangs and gambling websites.

One major scam against a foreigner happened last month when scammers pretended to be police. The ‘police’ called a Swiss man in Phuket, saying a FedEx package couldn’t be delivered. Since the man was expecting a FedEx package, he listened. The story then changed to say Bangkok police were holding a package in his name. The scammers told the man, Alain, that one man transferred 800,000 baht to Alain, and the other transferred 900,000 baht to him. They were eventually able to bully Alain into transferring 57,000 baht to them.

SOURCE: Nation Thailand