Hotline can quickly freeze accounts of scam victims
As police returned to the victims Bt1.7 million recently seized from gangsters involved in a “call-centre scheme”, the national police chief’s special advisor, Pol General Thanitsak Theerasawat, said forces had seized a total of Bt120 million from scammers and returned it to victims in the past seven month.
The Royal Thai Police’s Telephone and Electronic Fraud Prevention and Suppression Centre has worked with the Thai Bankers’ Association and its ATM service operators club in search of suspicious bank accounts and transactions.
They aim to seize money where they identify wrongdoing so that scammers are not able to withdraw the victims’ money, he said.
Tourist Police Division deputy commander Pol Maj-General Surachet Hakpan urged people who suspect that they have fallen victim to call-centre scammers to quickly alert police so they could freeze the money. Potential victims can reach officials through the centre’s hotline 1155 and the Anti-Money Laundering Office’s hotline 1710.
“The sooner you alert police, the more money we can freeze because in most cases scammers wouldn’t withdraw the cash right away,” he said.
If the victims were late to inform police and the scammers had already withdrawn the cash, police would have to ask the bank and the Anti-Money Laundering Office to check transactions in detail. That process would result in a longer wait for damaged victims to retrieve their money, he said.
Surachet also warned people not to accept a job in which they opened bank accounts for others as they would be held accountable in the crimes.
“The good news is the number of victims are continuously going down because many people can see through the tricks,” he said.