This is a bit of an all-too-common story I'm afraid. From what I have been told it happens all over the world as well. People meet a pretty girl on a dating site like Bumble or Tinder and they start talking, eventually the "girl" who probably isn't even a girl at all in the first place starts to ask for some form of money and then they girl, after getting that money, disappears.
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Now I think it is pretty easy to look at stories like this and just think that they guy is an idiot but I suppose there are some people out there that are so desperate for love and relationships that they will do stuff like this. Also, in Thailand it is quite common for men to pay for a woman's livelihood in order to prove that he is "serious" about her in the pursuit of marriage. Call it what you will but here is the story anyway.
A poor Thai man who works as a security guard where he makes 500 Baht (about $16) a day matched with the girl of his dreams on a dating site that the article didn't name probably for legal reasons. They talked for a while and she seemed really interested in him. They chatted for a long time and "she" somehow convinced him that she was in a rush to get married but needed a dowry, which is very common in this country. The scammer convince the man to send her installments of 300 of his 500 Baht per day with the objective being that they would get married once they had 10,000 Baht.
Of course after the 10,000 was raised "she" simply vanished without a trace because it was a scam to begin with. He went through certain avenues to attempt to get authorities involved but in this case there was nothing they authorities could do. I don't know if they attempted to track down the bank account of the person or persons in question but it is my understanding that banks are not obligated to turn over this information unless forced to do so by the police and they are not going to do that for something like a love tryst. So this Thai man who got scammed ended up having his story published by a bunch of websites and one of them was a popular English-language site called Thaiger.com .
I think the story was interesting to English readers because there are a ton of fake profiles on popular dating apps for foreigners as well and I have encountered quite a few of them myself. Someone in the Thaiger.com community felt touched by this tragic story as a lot of us would be since us foreigners sometimes forget how relatively affluent we are compared to the average Thai worker. The idea of making 500 THB a day is just crazy to us and well, one particular Danish man took it upon himself to help out.
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The Dane is named Chester and he is an investor that has lived in Thailand for 7 years. When he reached out to the news outlet stating that he wanted to help they were at first reluctant to pass on the information but Chester managed to get a hold of the scammed security guard anyway. The security guard was reluctant to have anything to do with anyone else at this point, fearing that he was merely going to be scammed again - which I suppose is understandable. However, one day the security guard got a notice on his phone that a deposit had been made into his account for not just 10,000 Baht, but an additional 5,000 Baht as well. This was a very nice gesture on the part of the Danish fella and it is kind of a heartwarming story. Chester passed along the message that was translated for the security guard to "not give up hope, real love is out there for you."
I don't know if Chester was looking for attention or not but I get the impression that he didn't know that this story was going to be published when he reached out to give away the money.
one thing that I particularly like about this story is that Chester is a tattoo-covered member of a motorcycle club and those guys get a bad reputation that I don't think is deserved. I ran into an MC that is based in Thailand called "Outsider" and these guys were some of the nicest people I have ever met, they just happened to look a bit scary and rode around on loud motorcycles. They were also very generous and regularly did fundraisers mostly aimed at helping out impoverished children. I guess the moral of the story here is to not judge a book by its cover.
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Now you'll have to forgive me for being a bit of a cynic, but when I first read the story about the Thai man getting scammed one of the first things that came to my mind was that the story was made up, and that the whole dating site story was actually a scam itself to get someone to give away money to this guy. That very well could be the case but the publishers do stand by their story and claim that it is real so that being the case, I think it is nice that everything worked out in the end.
Hopefully this guy will stop sending money to women he has never met before on line from this point forward.