The Thai zig zag scam is a confidence trick where one is falsely accused of shoplifting, and then held by police, or those claiming to be police, until "bail" is paid for the alleged theft. At times those fleeced are shown faked closed-circuit television footage as corroboration. In several cases in Thailand, this confidence trick has occurred at the airport, and thus is sometimes called the "Thai airport scam". Most reports of this scam are dated. [1]
According to the BBC, police in Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport have participated in a series of these scams, robbing tourists of thousands of dollars each time. [2] An English couple was charged with stealing a wallet. [2] The Thai embassy in Singapore published a rebuttal to the BBC article, stating that all legal proceedings in the case of the English were conducted "...in accordance with the law." [3] An Irish woman was charged with stealing eye-liner. [2] An Australian man was charged with stealing a doughnut. [4]
The gem scam is a confidence trick performed usually against tourists. The most known version occurs in Bangkok, Thailand as well as other cities in the country. It is one of the most pervasive scams in Thailand. Most of the shops are gold or jewelry shops. The marks tend to be tourists from outside Thailand. It has been alleged that this scam has been operating for the past 20 years, sometimes in the same premises. It has been suggested that individuals in the Royal Thai Police and even politicians protect this scam. The scam was demonstrated on an episode of the BBC series The Real Hustle and in a Scam City episode in Bangkok. Also in other countries such as Turkey and Sri Lanka, the trick is performed in various versions.
John Martin was an English spree killer who murdered three tourists—Gerard Lowe in Singapore, and Sheila and Darin Damude in Thailand—with another three unconfirmed victims. He posed as a tourist himself when committing the murders. He cut up all his victims' bodies, using butchery skills he had acquired in prison, before disposing of them.
The Royal Thai Police (RTP) is the national police force of Thailand. The RTP employs between 210,700 and 230,000 officers, roughly 17 percent of all civil servants. The RTP is frequently recognized as the fourth armed force of Thailand since their tradition, concept, culture, skill, and training are relatively similar to the army and most of their officer cadets need to graduate from the Armed Forces Academies Preparatory School before entering the Royal Thai Police Cadet Academy. Officers also undergo paramilitary training similar to the army but with an additional focus on law enforcement.
Klong Prem Central prison is a maximum security prison in Chatuchak District, Bangkok, Thailand. The prison has several separate sections. The compound houses up to 20,000 inmates. Within the perimeter of the compound are the Women's Central Prison, often referred to as "Lat Yao" or "Lat Yao women's prison". There is the Central Correction Institution for Drug Addicts, Bangkok Special Prison, and the Central Correctional Hospital. The Lat Yao men's section takes custody of male offenders whose sentence term is not over 25 years. As of 2002 the men's section held 1,158 foreigners from 56 countries out of a total of 7,218 prisoners. It is a part of the Thai Department of Corrections.
Sand theft or unauthorised or illegal sand mining leads to a widely unknown global example of natural and non-renewable resource depletion problem comparable in extent to global water scarcity. Beach theft is illegal removal of large quantities of sand from a beach leading to full or partial disappearance of the beach. In India illegal sand mining is the country's largest organized criminal activity.
Thai tailor scam is one of the most common confidence tricks performed in tourist hotspots in Thailand, such as Pattaya, Bangkok, Phuket, and beach towns like Khao Lak.
Victory Base Complex (VBC) was a cluster of U.S. military installations surrounding the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). The primary component of the VBC was Camp Victory, the location of the Al-Faw Palace, which served as the headquarters for the Multi-National Corps - Iraq, and later as the headquarters for the United States Forces - Iraq.
Zeus, ZeuS, or Zbot is a Trojan horse malware package that runs on versions of Microsoft Windows. While it can be used to carry out many malicious and criminal tasks, it is often used to steal banking information by man-in-the-browser keystroke logging and form grabbing. It is also used to install the CryptoLocker ransomware. Zeus is spread mainly through drive-by downloads and phishing schemes. First identified in July 2007 when it was used to steal information from the United States Department of Transportation, it became more widespread in March 2009. In June 2009 security company Prevx discovered that Zeus had compromised over 74,000 FTP accounts on websites of such companies as the Bank of America, NASA, Monster.com, ABC, Oracle, Play.com, Cisco, Amazon, and BusinessWeek. Similarly to Koobface, Zeus has also been used to trick victims of technical support scams into giving the scam artists money through pop-up messages that claim the user has a virus, when in reality they might have no viruses at all. The scammers may use programs such as Command prompt or Event viewer to make the user believe that their computer is infected.
Richard Allen Minsky, also known as Richard Alan Minsky, is an American former used car salesman who was convicted of multiple charges of rape, assault, battery, extortion, grand theft, larceny, lewd and lascivious behavior, oral copulation, sexual assault, sexual battery, sodomy, and escape. He was charged over 80 times and convicted in more than a dozen trials over a series of scams committed in the states of California, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.
Fortune telling fraud, also called the bujo or egg curse scam, is a type of confidence trick, based on a claim of secret or occult information. The basic feature of the scam involves diagnosing the victim with some sort of secret problem that only the grifter can detect or diagnose, and then charging the mark for ineffectual treatments. The archetypical grifter working the scam is a fortune teller who announces that the mark is suffering from a curse that her magic can relieve, while threatening dire consequences if the curse is not lifted.
Emmanuel Nwude Odinigwe popularly known as Owelle of Abagana is a Nigerian advance-fee fraud artist and former Director of Union Bank of Nigeria. He is known for defrauding Nelson Sakaguchi, a Director at Brazil's Banco Noroeste based in São Paulo, of $242 million: $191 million in cash and the remainder in the form of outstanding interest, between 1995 and 1998. His accomplices were Emmanuel Ofolue, Nzeribe Okoli, and Obum Osakwe, along with the husband and wife duo, Christian Ikechukwu Anajemba and Amaka Anajemba, with Christian later being assassinated.
Lèse-majesté in Thailand is a crime according to Section 112 of the Thai Criminal Code. It is illegal to defame, insult, or threaten the monarch of Thailand. Modern Thai lèse-majesté law has been on the statute books since 1908. Thailand is the only constitutional monarchy to have strengthened its lèse-majesté law since World War II. With penalties ranging from three to fifteen years imprisonment for each count, it has been described as the "world's harshest lèse majesté law" and "possibly the strictest criminal-defamation law anywhere"; its enforcement "has been in the interest of the palace".
Gone in 60 Seconds was a fraud scheme uncovered in 2012 involving the theft of over $1 million from Citibank using cash advance kiosks at casinos located in Southern California and Nevada.
Crime in Thailand has been a defining issue in the country for decades, inspiring years of policy and international criticism. Drug use and corruption make up the majority of the crime in Thailand and due to this, many Thai administrations attempted to curtail the drug trade, most notably Thaksin Shinawatra with the 2003 War on Drugs. Since 2003 crime has been decreasing with the crime rate decreasing from 9.97 to 2.58. Despite this, juvenile delinquency has been increasing in recent years.
A technical support scam, or tech support scam, is a type of fraud in which a scammer claims to offer a legitimate technical support service. Victims contact scammers in a variety of ways, often through fake pop-ups resembling error messages or via fake "help lines" advertised on websites owned by the scammers. Technical support scammers use social engineering and a variety of confidence tricks to persuade their victim of the presence of problems on their computer or mobile device, such as a malware infection, when there are no issues with the victim's device. The scammer will then persuade the victim to pay to fix the fictitious "problems" that they claim to have found. Payment is made to the scammer through ways which are hard to trace and have fewer consumer protections in place which could allow the victim to claim their money back, usually through gift cards.
Lakshman Arjuna Mahendran is a Sri Lankan born, Singaporean economist and banker. He is a former Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), having been appointed by President Maithripala Sirisena in January 2015 and served until the end of his term in 30 June 2016. He was the former Managing Director of HSBC Private Bank, Chief Investment Officer of Emirates NBD as well as Chairman and Director-General of the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka. Mahendran is currently residing in Singapore, which has refused to extradite him on a request from Sri Lanka routed through interpol.
Cryptocurrency and crime describes notable examples of cybercrime related to theft of cryptocurrencies and some of the methods or security vulnerabilities commonly exploited. Cryptojacking is a form of cybercrime specific to cryptocurrencies that has been used on websites to hijack a victim's resources and use them for hashing and mining cryptocurrencies.
The Tourist Police Bureau of Thailand was formed on September 1, 2017. It was elevated from the Tourist Police Division, which was formed in 1992 and traces its origins to 1976. The Tourist Police is a department of the Royal Thai Police, which is the main law enforcement agency in the country. The creation of the Tourist Police is due to the fact that the tourism and entertainment industry in Thailand is growing every year, and the number of people arriving in the country is constantly increasing. The priorities of the Tourist Police include cooperation with foreign nationals and the promotion of their security.