
A Thai woman allegedly connected with the biggest romance scam in Thailand's history has been arrested at Hat Yai International Airport, the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) revealed on Sunday.
CIB police apprehended Orathai, 52 (surname withheld) at the arrival terminal after she disembarked from a flight from Malaysia on Saturday. She was wanted on an arrest warrant for being a member of a secret society, being a member of a criminal association, participating in a transnational crime organisation, colluding in fraud through identity theft, and colluding in money laundering due to her alleged involvement in the 2022 romance scam.
The case, dubbed Thailand’s costliest romance scam, involved a transnational gang using a fake LinkedIn profile of a US army doctor working in Afghanistan to deceive the chief financial officer (CFO) of a multinational company's Thailand branch and stealing 6.3 billion baht (US$186 million) from her company.
The Thai CFO was arrested and charged with multiple crimes including theft. Warrants were issued for the arrests of nearly 100 Thais and Nigerian nationals. Efforts to arrest the suspects are still ongoing.
According to the CIB statement, Orathai confessed to being the person in the arrest warrant when police presented her with the document. She claimed that her Nigerian partner asked her to open bank accounts in Thailand because he was unable to do so due to his overseas nationality. The accounts were for him to open a company in Thailand.
Ms Orathai opened several accounts and let her partner take charge of all the deposit and withdrawal transactions through them.
Investigators discovered financial links between Ms Orathai’s bank accounts and the companies involved in some of the fraudulent fund transfers in the case, leading to the issuance of her arrest warrant.
Ms Orathai went to Malaysia to work in a massage shop in 2017 where she met and fell in love with a Nigerian man.
“After living with him for two years, with him paying all the expenses so that I didn’t have to work, he asked me to open bank accounts for him as he wanted to run a business in Thailand,” she said.
“He paid me 6,500 baht per account. I only knew later that my bank accounts had been used to receive money from people who had been defrauded.”
The arrest came after police had received a tip-off that Ms Orathai would travel to Thailand to meet her child.