Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing, well foreign vendors were essentially chased into the ocean - I’ll get into it here in a moment - over Work Permit violations. This is something a lot of foreigners, especially Western foreigners sometimes don't understand.

I have talked about this in prior videos when I have talked about “beg-packing”. You will see sometimes, it hasn't happened so much recently, but in the past, foreigners would come here, and they would start sitting around on the streets trying to sell things and beg on the streets saying, "oh can you support our vacation", or whatever. Yeah, the Thais don't take kindly to that; other tourists don't really take kindly to it; us expats don't like it at all. It's not a good idea. But another thing that it doesn't come up very often, but every once in a while, I will see a Western foreigner try to do something akin to being a foreign street vendor, and you need to understand they take this really seriously here. The point of this video is actually the vendors in question here were not Western, but the reason I bring it up is they go after folks from this part of the world for being an illegal vendor, believe me when I tell you if they see a foreigner trying to be an illegal vendor, they are going to have a real problem with that.

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Foreign vendors leap into sea to flea Pattaya police. Quoting directly: "Pattaya Police have arrested eight foreign nationals who were selling snacks to tourists in a predawn raid on Pattaya Beach." Now it is important to point out, this occurred really early in the morning and that means that they had to plan this thing ahead. So again, they take foreigners working in Thailand without appropriate work authorization quite seriously from a law enforcement perspective; this is the Police here. Quoting further: "The operation began at 4.36am. It followed complaints from residents about illegal foreign vendors targeting tourists along the beach." And again, other Thai vendors are going to be pretty unhappy about this stuff. So any kind of foreigner engaging in that street vending activity, rest assured there are going to be consequences; they are going to be pretty quick too, pretty swift in being applied. Quoting further: "Eventually, the cold proved too much," - I urge those who are watching this video, go check out that article, they go into detail. They literally chased them into the sea, and they were swimming around out there for quite a while. That said, quoting further: "Eventually, the cold proved too much, and they swam back to the beach and were taken into custody. Police said seven of the detainees were Vietnamese and the other was Cambodian. The snacks they were selling to tourists were impounded as evidence." So okay impounded as evidence.

In any event, I think the point of this video is to basically reiterate that look there are certain things that even the police take really seriously when it comes to work authorization. Engaging in street vending here in Thailand of any kind, if you are a foreigner and bear in mind, for lack of a better term, Cambodians and Vietnamese are going to be able to "blend in" a lot more than would a Western foreigner here in Thailand, and yet I still will occasionally about a year, once a year I'll see this, some Westerner engaging in some kind of street activity here in Thailand and they are pretty summarily shuffled along, and oftentimes shuffled along into detention and deportation from the Kingdom of Thailand.