Bus / coach bag theft perpetrator caught in Southern Thailand

This particular scam is one that I have been warning people about for years because more than one of my friends has been directly affected by it.

The scam goes like this:

You buy a bus ticket, normally a cheap one that is on a bus that is filled with a majority of other foreigners. I have once encountered a bus journey that didn't allow Thai people on it and they pretended as though this was for language reasons. The real reason, sadly, is for something far more devious.

Once you load your luggage under the bus you are put into your seats up top with the luggage stored down below where you think nobody has access to it. However, the staff has an entrance to the luggage area while the bus is moving that they can access even while the bus is still moving.

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I'm not saying this happens on every single bus, nor am I trying to say that Thai people are thieves. What I am saying is that this particular scam has happened a lot and often the charges are not even pursued because the people who are the victims often don't even know that it has happened to them until long after it does and then the bus company and the drivers / staff have plausible deniability because it "could have happened somewhere else."

In this particular case though, the bus operator got greedy and was just very bold in how willing he was to leave a paper trail with him wearing a rather stupid disguise that he was still wearing when the police turned up to arrest him.

A Romanian tourist was traveling by bus through Surrat-Thani, which is a very common place to transfer through if you are coming/going to/from any of the popular islands off the coast. These islands you may have heard of and they are Koh Tao, Koh Samui, and Koh Phang-Ngan. I do not know which once the customer was traveling from but it doesn't really matter.

While in transit and after arriving at her destination she noticed that her credit card was missing from her luggage, and called her bank to cancel it when she discovered that 280,000 Baht had already been withdrawn from the account in the past day. This is no small sum as it is around $8500.

Because of the amount the bank actually decided to pursue investigating it and was able to find that someone wearing the same outfit had withdrawn money from over a dozen ATM's in the area.

Now I will say this, the pin code for the card was written on the card and if that is not a level of extreme stupidity I don't know what is. That temptation might have been too much for the driver to resist but this doesn't change the fact that he got it from inside her luggage so a real justice system would realize that ciminal intent was there before figuring out that there was a code written on the card.

Most ATM machines in this country limit your withdrawal to 10 or 15 thousand baht, which explains why the thief went to so many machines. They do not indicate how it was that they determined who the person was, but when they went to pay him a visit at his house, he didn't try to deny that he committed the crime and he was still wearing the same clothes as he was in the CCTV footage. He was caught red-handed and he knew it. Also, in Thailand the authorities tend to take it easy on criminals that don't try to lie to them and I guess that is a good thing but doesn't do a great deal to deter crime if they only give the guy a slap on the wrist.

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in Thailand, they have this rather silly tradition or perhaps protocol of taking photographs of the person in question with the stuff that was involved in the crime which in this case is the money itself and his easily identified Jordan shorts. Why Immigration police are there is anyone's guess but I hope it was some sort of inter-office cooperation.

I can't help but feel a little bit bad for the bus driver because his home certainly isn't very nice and I am sure he doesn't live a life of luxury. That doesn't give him the right to rob people though.

The thing with this crime though, is that once again, I suspect this was only pursued by the police because it hit social media and went viral. When my friends had their money go missing, social media wasn't as all encompassing as it is now and the authorities just gave them a form to submit to their travel insurance company, as if that was something that everyone just has. They made no attempt to so much as question the bus company operators at that time.

This just kind of leads back to what I have been saying a lot of lately, about how Thailand is shootings itself in the foot as far as their tourism program is concerned and for them, this is a very large part of how people in Thailand make a living. With over 20% of the countries overall GDP being tourism-oriented, this means that tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people are employed in this sector. If the world starts to turn their backs on Thailand tourism, a lot of people are going to suffer.

If you do travel on a bus in Thailand be sure to keep track of your valuable and carry them on your person if you are on a bus. Do not leave them in your bag under the bus because it can be accessed by the people who work on that bus.