Transcript of the above video: 

This video today is going to kind of cover the waterfront of everything we have been seeing here recently with regard to banking issues, and so-called mule accounts. I'm going to briefly tap into or touch on tax, a little bit of tax analysis and where I think this is going, due process or lack thereof in banking in Thailand. 

For those who are interested in long-form analysis of this stuff, and analysis regarding local Thai Politics as well as geo-politics and regional politics, Immigration Tax, as well as banking and how it all sort of factors in to a witch's brew and can contribute to analysis on expat land here in Thailand, it may be worth it to you to email us, [email protected], and we can get you on the mailing list for Integrity News Service where I do long form videos on a weekly basis, minimum, discussing things that are going on here and the possible ramifications in expat land. To be clear, I've been getting feedback from folks on the paid news service. It really is long form and it's me just sort of in a sense, I hate to call it stream of consciousness, that’s not quite right, it's organized but it's almost lecture format, in a monologue kind of setting, going through the things I'm seeing, the news of the day, and how I see it possibly have an impact on expat land. So that is sort of the format. Also while I'm talking to my book, it is worth pointing out, we'll throw some pictures up as well, Pancake Palace. This is the restaurant my better half and I set up here in downtown Bangkok and we are open for business. If you are interested in breakfast anytime, as well as American Diner food, links in the description below to our location. We would be happy to see you there. 

So now that I'm out of the way of all of that, or I have gotten all of that out of the way I should say, what are we talking about here? Well I have seen a bunch of analysis, good, bad, everything in between; I have also seen a lot of just nonsense in the mainstream press covering this whole issue of "mule accounts". A thing I saw recently, I'm not even going to cite anything, I think I saw it in the Bangkok Post, but off the top of my head, I am not completely sure what they said, "oh well mule accounts can send somebody who is innocent money, and then that person's account gets freezed." What is that? I saw that in an article recently. In a sense I have noticed that there has just been a lot of spin up without a lot of explanation. Again this whole narrative reminds me a lot of COVID, where it is just a lot of scare, a lot of sizzle and no steak if you will, especially in terms of due process. How is it incumbent on somebody who received money in their account from some other account, that then their account gets to be frozen, without really any notification. To the best of my knowledge without any kind of Court order, without any kind of legal process. Just BOOM, we preemptively are freezing that, at whose behest? Is some AI algorithm driving this? Is there some human that is saying, "oh this meets the metrics of a problem, we are freezing that account"? All of this just stinks of totalitarianism for lack of a better term, and frankly it's not, I've done the videos on this, it's not at all conducive to creating a friendly business environment in Thailand. I think it will have tremendous negative implications for liquidity and velocity of money in this jurisdiction in a business context, and foreign investment, especially foreign investment in SMEs, and SMEs, small and medium-size enterprises, are what drives the economy here. And the Press is talking about this like, "oh if a mule account sends you money, then BOOM, we are going to freeze that account, but don't worry we will work as quickly as we can for innocent account holders." I've seen articles talking about that. Well if they are innocent, then why are they being deprived the use of their own money, the use of their own funds? And yes, I know the semantic folks will get in the comments and say, "well hey Ben, it's really not your money in the account. The moment you deposit it, it becomes a credit on hand of the bank; you become the bank's creditor to that amount." Yeah, I get all of that, okay. We also all understand common conceptions about Banking and money, okay? When you put a deposit in, that is credited to you. You want access to it, and it's not right in any way shape or form that without due process of law just because someone that they deem to be a mule account, which again what is the definition of that? How is somebody deemed to be that? What's the due process behind deeming someone that? But that designated type of account sends you money. You didn't do anything affirmatively, but they say, "oh now your account is frozen!" Where's the due process in that? I just don't see it. 

Meanwhile, to touch on tax. I have to imagine that to some extent, all of this to my mind is being rolled out, it looks to me at the behest of the World Economic Forum, the Organization of so-called Economic Cooperation and Development, which unfortunately, say what you will about the generals, the uncles so-called in Thai vernacular, during the near decade they were in power over here, we didn't see any of this for nearly 10 years. And as I brought up in prior videos, they didn't go to the World Economic Forum either; they didn't have any interaction with any of that. Then starting in August of 2023, we were barraged with this stuff. Former Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin even went to the World Economic Forum. I did the videos on that at the time, and what have we gotten out of it? Slower banking, almost neo-Soviet Digital Banking and now no real due process in banking, and I have to ask, is this all being designed to create some kind of more intrusive totalitarian tax system? They certainly tried to set up one with the so-called Digital Wallet. They were going to put the country into a tremendous amount of debt to do it, which would have resulted in us all being taxed more to pay it off, even though nobody really voted for that. That said, they wanted to do that. Then they were going to impose the digital tokens that could be tracked and traced; they could designate what you could buy on it; they could designate where you could buy things on it because they would set a perimeter for its usage, and they said they could turn it on and off and they could set an expiration date on it. Again this is where sort of the nexus with tax here and all of this stuff is, are you trying to do that sort of through the side door, the back door, claiming that there is some “scourge” in mule accounts in much the same way a lot of totalitarian measures were undertaken under the pretext of “COVID”, by the way at the behest of a Communist who was heading up the World Health Organization at the time, who by the way himself never got vaccinated; there's footage of him talking about that. 

So again, the point I am trying to make in this video is all of this is deeply concerning. Notwithstanding the fact, again very similar to COVID, they use a lot of verbiage that sounds very formally correct: "oh, we are going after mule accounts”, and “we have created a war room to combat and basically speed up the process of releasing your account." How about you not seize people's accounts to begin with? How about you use due process and only seize accounts if you have some sort of Court Order or something that has gone through the due process of ascertaining whether or not some criminal activity has actually occurred, rather than just "oh, we designate this a mule account", and that account sent money to this account even though this person is completely innocent and did nothing. They are only guilty of the crime of someone sending them money, which they can't control to begin with. Again, it sounds a lot like COVID where it's like the onus is on you that the disease could somehow possibly hit you, and therefore they can take away all of your rights. It's nonsense. I talked about that when I did a video on proximate cause and the notion of COVID. It's like a tornado going through a barn and then a piece of the barn hitting somebody else's house and then trying to sue the barn owner. Well the barn owner didn't build the barn and that resulted in the house being hit by a piece of the barn. It was the tornado that did it. At the end of the day, it is not the person who's in the receiving account that is doing anything wrong, even if you believe the premise of the "mule account" is the bad actor, it is that person. So where does anybody get the right to seize this person's account? Just cancel that one transaction and move on. You claim you have all of this ability with all this Digital Banking now. Where is it? If anything, everything just looks like it's being slowed down and going to an almost primitive state of banking. 

So again, in summing all of this up, I just don't see where there is due process with regard to all of this intrusive banking, frankly, not to be redundant, banking intrusion might be the right word. On top of that, I am starting to wonder if this is somehow some way of like bringing in some mechanism to suck money out of people's accounts or seize people's accounts until they pay some amount of money that is later put upon them. As I have discussed in other videos especially like the LTR Visa, which we haven't really seen that fully play out, but in the event that there is a review associated with getting one's next 5 years on an LTR Visa, there is effectively an audit looking backward at all of one's banking activity presumably; they are going to have the ability to do that. Who's to say they don't use this mechanism, "oh, we will seize it, until you pay us what we think you owe us." Again, they have the legal authority to do that under the tax clearance regime, which I have talked about in prior videos in the past. 

So the point I'm trying to make is all of this is deeply concerning. I don't see where it is based on any legal framework that has been in any way elucidated to the public, nor have I seen anything passed through Parliament to this effect. That said, I'll keep doing research and I'll keep my finger on the pulse of the issue of banking, tax, at the end of the day due process, as well as this whole "so-called" issue of "mule accounts" and I will certainly be keeping people updated on this channel as the situation evolves.