Police Arrest 3 Chinese Gangsters for Kidnapping and Extortion

Police report two men and a woman from China have been arrested on charges that they kidnapped a fellow Chinese woman and forced her to pay them about 3.2 million baht. in ester Thailand’s Sa Kaeo province.

Police said that the three people were taken into custody on Saturday at a hotel in Sa Kaeo’s Aranyaprathet district. They were then taken to the Thong Lor police station in Bangkok to be questioned.

A 32-year-old Chinese woman who was getting her bachelor’s degree, Menglu Weng, filed a complaint with the Thong Lor police on Friday. The police didn’t say who she was.

Ms. Menglu said that on Thursday night, March 16, she was going to meet a Chinese woman about her age whom she had just met recently to eat at a restaurant in the Ekamai area. After the meal, the woman showed her to a black Toyota Alphard in the parking lot. There, a Chinese man with a knife forced her into the car, which was driven by another Chinese man. The person she had dinner with also got into the van.

After the car left, the man with the knife made her use her cell phone to send 250,000 yuan and 8,000 USDT (a stable cryptocurrency called Tether) to an account.

Ms. Menglu, the other woman, and the two men spent the night in the van. That night, one of the men made her call her boyfriend in China and tell him to send another 50,000 USDT to her imToken app. After that, the money was moved to the same account.

According to police the two Chinese men let the two women go on Friday morning in the Min Buri neighbourhood of Bangkok. They forced the victim to give them cash and cryptocurrency worth a total of about 3.2 million baht.

Ms. Menglu said she went to her condo in the Asoke area on her own, away from the other woman, before filing a complaint with the Thong Lor police.

Police from Thong Lor went to the restaurant in the Ekamai neighbourhood. The two Chinese women got into a Toyota Alphard, which was seen on security camera footage. From looking at the video, the police thought that the other woman was being used as bait in the plan to get money.

Later, the police found out that the Toyota Alphard had been rented from a car rental shop for 5,000 baht per day from March 15 to 17. On March 17, the car was taken back to the shop.

The police thought that the two Chinese men and the other Chinese woman were all part of the same gang. They looked into the matter.

The investigation showed that the two Chinese men and the woman stayed at a hotel in Pattaya (on Pattaya South road in Chon Buri’s Bang Lamung district) before going to Sa Kaeo province, where they stayed at the Hitz Hotel in Aranyaprathet district.

On Sunday morning, the three were arrested at the hotel and taken to Bangkok’s Thong Lor police station for more questioning. The police didn’t tell anyone who the three suspects were.

Police Arrest Fake Doctors

In other police news, two men were arrested on Saturday after police raided two clinics in Bangkok and Pathum Thani. They were working as doctors without licenses, which is against the law.

The head of the Consumer Protection Police Division (CPPD), Pol Maj Gen Anan Nanasombat, said that the first clinic was in the Kheha Romklao housing estate on Rat Pattana road in the Lat Krabang district of Bangkok.

It was found that the clinic had been running without a permit. Rathaphum Osotbundhit, 51, was found checking up on patients as a doctor, but he didn’t have a license to do so.

Mr. Rathaphum is said to have admitted that he worked at a hospital for about 13 years and got some medical experience before going overseas to study medicine but not finishing.

When he went back to Thailand, he opened a clinic without a permit and started practising medicine without a license about three months ago.

Mr. Rathaphum was accused of not having a permit to open a clinic and of practising medicine without a license. The second clinic was in Khlong Luang district, Pathum Thani province, at Soi Thai Thanee 6 in the Nava Nakorn Industrial Estate.

Kritsaran Naksang, who was 36 years old, was working as a doctor at the clinic and was looking at patients. With a permit, the clinic was found to be running well.

But Mr. Kritsaran admitted that he did not have a license to practice. He said he got his medical degree from a school in another country and was working as an intern at a state hospital. He worked at the clinic while he was waiting to take a test to get his license.

He was taken into custody and accused of being a doctor without a license.

Fake Teacher Scams Parents

Meanwhile, the parents and guardians of more than 30 students in Chaiyaphum province are looking for justice after a crook posing as an extracurricular teacher scammed them out of money.

Somboon Inchuwong, the chief of Sa Baeng village in tambon Huai Bong, led 21 parents and guardians to file a complaint against Anek Saklo, 46, who posed as an instructor from Rajabhat Chaiyaphum University and offered extracurricular classes for 2,500 baht per student.

The accused is said to have made more than 75,000 baht by tricking the families of students from pre-school to grade 9 into paying for Thai, math, English, and computer classes on weekends.

Mr. Anek started the classes in December of last year. He got kids of different ages together at a community pavilion and gave them simple worksheets. Students filled out the worksheets in two-hour sessions over the course of three weekends. This only added up to 12 hours of instruction out of the 32 hours that were promised. He stopped being reachable before February, when the job was supposed to be done.

The village headman did some research and found that Mr. Anek, who didn’t have a degree or teaching license, had pulled a similar scam in other villages, usually fooling about 20 students before moving on to the next one. People thought that his trick made him more than 175,000 baht.

Later, police found him at a house in Phitsanulok province and put him in jail on Thursday.

Even though Mr. Anek admitted to lying, police said he told them he didn’t have the money to pay back his victims. Parents who went to find the suspect have asked the police to punish him to the fullest extent of the law if he can’t pay them back.

Mr. Anek is being held in jail while more charges are brought against him.