Thai involved in money laundering for scam centres arrested

The unnamed individual was arrested at his residence in Chiang Rai’s Mae Fah Luang district after returning home to escape Thailand’s large-scale crackdown on call centre gangs in February.

The suspect has been charged with involvement with transnational crime, defrauding the public and inputting fake information into the computer system.

He told the police that he worked in an office in Poipet operated by a Chinese scam gang boss from November 11, 2023 to February 13, 2025. The office generated revenue from its 8-12% share of call centre scams totalling some 30 million baht.

Twenty Thai mule accounts were set up to launder the money through the office daily, he explained, adding that the Chinese boss would pay 8,000-12,000 baht per account.

His responsibilities were as follows:

• Translate for the Chinese bosses
• Check the bank application to open the mule account
• Scan the mule account holder to transfer money
• Change cash in the mule account into Tether USDT cryptocurrency through applications like Binance, Bitkub, BinanceTH and Orbix
• Transfer USDT digital currency to the Chinese boss’s wallet. The Chinese boss then distributes USDT to each call centre gang’s wallet based on money that each gang has earned.