Rather massive residency fraud discovered in Bangkok apartment building
There is always some sort of scam going on as far as registration with the government is concerned and the times that this makes the news it almost always involves foreigners. I don't want to seem like too much of a cynic, but when fraud is exposed that involves only Thai people, this kind of gets swept under the rug or just outright dismissed. News stations are NOT free here, if you report on something that the government wants to keep a secret you will get raided and shut down.
This country is a good country, but it has a massive corruption problem that I don't think anyone can actually solve. They would have to scrap the entire thing and start over. This is probably why there are regularly coups in this country.
The foreigners in question this time are not tourists though, but you can believe that they definitely are involved in some way with that industry.
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Thailand has a special sort of relationship with Myanmar or Burma in that this country's citizens are not very desirable residents and Thailand almost never plays the political amnesty game, but what they do like about the Burmese is that they tend to be completely willing to do dirty jobs for very little money. Another subsect of this group of people are the ones that speak English really well and therefore are ready for the tourism industry. I have been to an island off the coast between here and Myanmar that is basically 100% staffed by Burmese and it is one of the best places to visit in the entire country.
So the story of the fraud originates around the fact that in order for Burmese people to stay long term, they have to obtain a residency card or what is more commonly known as a "pink card" and then they no longer have to bother with visas. This doesn't mean that they are citizens, it just means that they don't have to leave.
This system was originally intended to be for political refugees but as is the case with almost anything in the world, it quickly spiraled into a situation where agents were organizing a corrupt system so that the highest bidder got the cards.
Then they ran out of cards so they started inventing addresses and when that didn't work they started to double up and triple up on actual existing buildings and apartments.
In this latest "sting" which almost certainly was not a sting but rather some official not getting as much bribe money as they required, some of the addresses at a massive cheap apartment complex in Bangkok had 1000 rooms more than actually exist registered, and some of the actual existing apartments that were there had over 60 different people registered to them.
One thing I did like to see that came out of this was that people who were involved in the corrupt organization were actually arrested, including 3 state officials. I don't know exactly what "state official" means but you can be guaranteed that it isn't the people that are genuinely in charge. It is probably some assistant underling who handles the paperwork and they were likely let know beforehand that they were going to be the fall guy and were compensated for it.
Another suspicion comes to my mind about this building and of course we will never get a followup about it but Bangkok real estate is extremely valuable and this might be the beginning stages of a land grab. The government may use this "infraction" as justification to seize the land from the owners and people will pretend to be angry and surprised but this is likely all just a charade.
I do enjoy some of the quotes that officials will make during this process as they pretend to be puritan upholders of the law.
Thailand is very happy to welcome foreign nationals if they comply with Thailand’s laws and regulations. If anyone, whether Thai or foreign, becomes involved in an illegal process, action must be taken.
The idea that the government is pushing forward is that this process negatively affects the benefits and welfare that was intended for the Thai people. What benefits? I've not seen any and i've been here for years.
There are so many barriers in the way of doing anything in Thailand and I feel as though at times the system has been made intentionally difficult so that people have no choice but to engage in bribery oriented situations. When the bribe situation is no longer satisfactory to the people collecting the bribes while turning to look away, the make a "discovery" and have a "sting" and make a few ceremonial arrests, declare themselves heroes, and then the story completely disappears from the news.