Actress Sawika "Pinky" Chaidet, her mother and her brother were arraigned in court and denied bail on Thursday on charges of operating a forex Ponzi scheme that cheated thousands of victims out of about 2 billion baht.
Sawika, 36, her mother Sarinya and her elder brother Kitichet were among 19 defendants public prosecutors indicted in the Criminal Court on charges of committing public fraud and computer crime. All were denied bail.
The court was told that from Nov 25, 2015, to Sept 8, 2020, the defendants invited people through Facebook to invest in the Forex-3D foreign exchange group, and 9,824 people invested a total of 2.49 billion baht.
The court accepted the case and denied bail requests from all defendants because of the huge damage and heavy punishments involved in the case.
Forex-3D was run by Apiruk Kothi, 28, who lured thousands of victims into investing in foreign currencies with the promise of high returns. He was arrested on Jan 15 last year, after more than a year on the run.