Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing issues associated with a person who was arrested, an accountant here in Thailand apparently arrested on warrants associated with banking. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Phuket News, that is thephuketnews.com, the article is titled: Woman accountant arrested on five warrants for scam gang 'mule' accounts. Mule in quotation marks if you will. Quoting directly: "Officers from the Central Investigation Bureau have arrested a woman accountant in Phuket who was wanted on five separate arrest warrants for opening bank accounts used by at least one call centre scam gang." Quoting further: "Among the charges against her, it was found that Kanraya had used a bank account to receive transfers of money obtained by defrauding the public in various ways, such as claiming to be a Police Officer at Muang Chang Rai Police Station, deceiving victims into transferring money for verification, deceiving victims into investing and selling products online by claiming that they would receive high returns, and tricking people into selling products online, among others, the CIB noted in their report." That is the Central Investigation Bureau here in Thailand. The thing to take away from this video and the thing to understand about what's going on here is again we have seen a tightening up if you will, something of a clamp down, heightened scrutiny whatever you want to call it associated with banking here in Thailand. 

Now on one level I do have problems with this because I do believe in a certain amount of personal privacy, especially with respect to one's own personal finances and financial transactions. I really don't think all this nanny-state stuff is a good idea but there are if you will, upsides or maybe an upshot is the right word regarding these type of policy changes and one of the many ramifications is yeah, they are likely to find more of these scammers and unfortunately they do exist. We have discussed before, there are scams out there where they have impersonated our Law Firm before. We will have people contact us saying: 

"Hey, does this person work for you?" 

"No, that doesn't have anything to do with us," and they are trying to get money out of people.

So on the one hand, at a very micro level, I can see how there are limited instances where this can be a positive thing. That said, I really don't think necessarily that the benefit if you will of capturing a few of these scammers is quite worth the complete, honestly dissolution of all of our banking privacy. I don't think that the juice is worth the squeeze as they say, that the benefits outweigh the cost. That said, it is noteworthy that yeah there are ramifications to these rule changes which do result in folks who are operating nefariously, who are doing things that are illegal and are defrauding people, it is resulting in them being apprehended and being brought to justice. So yeah, I guess every cloud sort of has a silver lining. 

That said, it would be nice if we just didn't have scammers to begin with and we could have our banking privacy. And again I don't necessarily agree with the notion that because we have these rules, and we catch a few of these people, that it is at the end of the day worth it when compared to real banking privacy and privacy with regard to one's financial transactions.