The Swindling Frog of Pattaya: A Trusted Banker Who Defrauded Hundreds of Millions
Mr. Frog's fraud hit the wires like a ton of bricks in February 2021. The case is still on-going, but True Crime Thailand decided to take a deep look into the background of the thief.
If you're reading this, I reckon you read news out of Thailand.
Maybe you even follow the crime stories I put out at True Crime Thailand. And if not, I don't fault you — I'm an upstart, a one-man band. I have two hands and 24 hours in the day, just like you. There's only so much I can do with them.
Even so, I've built a small following and I cover the crime that I can — but I'm not an institution.
I write crime stories because for some reason, I have to. It's a sort of aberrant compulsion — but this isn't a story for me to make personal confessions.
If you do follow me, you might be wondering why I've been so quiet this past week. There's nothing to worry about. My hands have been busy digging into the details of this story that I'm sure you'll enjoy.
Let's jump right into that then. This intro didn't pan out to be half as clever as I hoped. But this crime story?
Oh, it's a good one.
I bet you heard about the one where an assistant bank branch manager pilfered hundreds of millions of baht from foreigners in Pattaya. The story broke early February, just last month.
The banking dacoit stole a lot of money, if we can trust the reports.
Police have accounted for hundreds of victims. They got hit for anywhere between 10,000 and 130 million baht — yeah, that last figure? A Chinese guy coughed up that much coin to the scamming banker.
The scheme operated over a period of at least two years.
The thief relieved funds from his victims mainly with two tactics:
When victims transferred money into Thailand from abroad, the assistant bank manager stole the funds.
The banker sold fraudulent, high-yield investment products to the victims.
The banker didn't pick his victims randomly, and victims didn't trust this banker just because.
I found evidence that this banker worked at this branch for over ten years. And in the course of his career there, he got to know the account holders — farang, Thai, and Chinese — who grew to trust him over that time.
But trust between persons can't be weighed or measured, it can't be sold off for baht or gold. The banker used this trust to open the door to the victim's accounts, but it's not how he kept the operation undetected for over two years.
His thievery depended on the victims believing that money was really in their accounts.
So, the banker used outdated bank books to print transactions out for the victims.
By all measures, the bank books looked real — they were branded with the bank's logo, they were printed at the bank branch, and they were handed over by a man who wore the green jacket emblazoned with the logo of the bank he worked for.
That green jacket. An odd coincidence that this man would end up wearing green while he thieved.
Green — the color of life, nature, growth, money, and frogs.
Frogs — what? Have I lost the plot?
What does a frog have to do with hundreds of people defrauded at a bank in Pattaya?
This story ventures to answer just that question.
Let's start where the most vile of frogs are found: the swamp.
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A Swamp of Details
This is one of those stories that can almost tell itself.
There are so many details, dates, places, and photos, that when splashed on the page together would paint a strange criminal picture.
All of the elements of a good crime story would be there: the thief and his background, the amount he stole, possible accomplices, his victims, statements from the police, news reports.
But the details would be disordered. The figures misplaced, the facts jumbled, the plot incoherent.
The real value I bring is to string together the details in an order that makes sense. Because there's a lot to consider here.
It took me over 47 hours to compile these details — I know because I timed myself while researching. After doing other in-depth stories for True Crime Thailand I was curious how much work I actually put into a story.
Like I said, there's a lot here.
As I ventured out into the wilds of the world wide web to lasso in the facts of this case, I thought about how I'd tell this story.
And after plenty of thought, it made sense to tell it by focusing the lens on the main player.
I'm talking about Frog (Thai: กบ, "gob"), the nickname of a thieving assistant bank manager — the man arrested for defrauding hundreds of his customers in Pattaya.
Disregard the bunny ears on Mr. Frog — you guessed it, he’s the guy on the far-right. Maybe he was role-playing as a bunny, or maybe he was just having fun that night.
You’ll also notice that I put generic emojis over the others in this photo. I’ll do the same throughout the story — excepting only Mr. Frog.
There are a couple others in this story that I’ll only identify with special emojis, like I do in this photo with Ms. Pig, who sits next to Mr. Frog, and who is a character I will introduce you to later in this story.
Where I would start with Mr. Frog, as I'll refer to him in this story, wasn't so clear to me.
Should I start chronologically?
Lay out what he did and when, starting as far back as I could, and call the facts out one by one, month by month, year by year, bringing us to the day that the ball dropped at the bank?
No, that wouldn't be right — on two counts.
One, the stuff of Mr. Frog's earliest years really doesn't speak to his crimes. His character and personality come through, sure: his penchant for posting gore, car crash, and crime videos on Facebook; his love for travel abroad; his tender side — in matters of love and compassion for his fellow man.
We'll get to all that a bit later.
The second count: I didn't wade through the muck of details in this case chronologically.
I followed the money — and I considered the psychology and motives of our thief, Mr. Frog, with every step.
As I trudged through the swamp of the case picking up details in years worth of Facebook posts across multiple profiles, Google searches, ThaiVisa forum posts, Thai news reports and YouTube videos of the victims, the weight of the evidence bogged me down.
My gait slowed, back burdened with a heavy sack full of clues.
Clues that were relevant or not — I wasn't always quite sure.
I needed a way to cut through the noise.
The discipline of intelligence gathering is served by multiple methods, some that I used in the course of collecting evidence for this story.
The primary method I used? OSINT, otherwise known as open-source intelligence.
Think of it as data that's accessible in publicly available sources. Media like magazines, television, newspapers; Internet sources like blogs, forums, social media; public commercial and government data.
You get the idea — data that anybody could find if they were looking for it.
I used a bit of HUMINT, too: human intelligence.
Now, normally HUMINT is used in the context of military intelligence gathering. Sources include diplomats, prisoners of war, refugees, military patrol of conflict zones.
Fundamentally, HUMINT involves soliciting information from someone else. There's a million ways one could solicit information from others.
For the purposes of this story, HUMINT involved contacting people associated with the case: Mr. Frog's banking victims, people who banked at the branch, people who witnessed the scheme in operation.
I found these people through my OSINT activity — reviewing Facebook posts, YouTube videos, comments on news stories online, and forum activity. They did provide helpful information on the case, which I'll reveal as this story unfolds.
The real progress in moving through the cursed bog of intelligence and connecting the web of clues happened with IMINT, or imagery intelligence.
I scooped up 248 photos from the swamp of open-source intelligence.
I studied each one, taking careful note of who took the photo, where it was taken, who appeared in the photo, where it was posted, when it was posted, any caption attached to the photo, and whatever other details could be gleaned.
Sorting through the towering pile of data turned over questions that I hadn't considered before, revealed new swamp paths to plod, and it introduced other key individuals in the case.
I didn't analyze this data alone.
Across every stage of intelligence gathering and assessment, I utilized the help of a trusted True Crime Thailand reader that offered constructive criticism to my working theories on the case, provided insight into key pieces of evidence, and kept the line of my inquiry aimed straight on the right targets. Their input was invaluable here.
So it's at this point that I should start serving up what I've found.
Where do you think I should start?
Yeah, I thought so, too.
Getting to Know Mr. Frog
The first record I found of Mr. Frog anywhere online comes from an update found on The Pattaya Orphanage website from February 2011.
I found it by searching Mr. Frog's name in Thai. Simple enough.
The text translates from the Thai as follows:
Khun Chaiyasit Sapphoemphull (along with two others) from Kasikorn Bank Pattaya Klang branch (ธนาคารกสิกรไทย สาขาพัทยากลาง), came to make merit for the New Year festival. They made a large donation of items including infant formula, snacks, and milk. The kids would like to give thanks for the donation. The workers and administrators of the Pattaya Orphanage wishes you happiness and prosperity throughout the year of 2011.
The branch mentioned — Kasikorn Bank's Pattaya Klang — is the branch where 10 years later Mr. Frog, or Khun Chaiyasit Sapphoemphull, was reported to have defrauded hundreds of millions of baht from hundreds of his customers.
After punching the clock there for more than a decade, Mr. Frog knew the branch and its customers very well. He cultivated friendships and trust with the branch's clients. And he became a trusted member of the branch's operational team.
By all accounts, this branch functioned smoothly. It was cited in several forums to be a go-to for local expats and foreigners needing sort out international banking concerns, such as transfers from abroad.
They say the internet doesn't forget, but regarding the K-Bank Pattaya Klang branch, there wasn't much there to forget.
At the legendary forum where Thailand's expats have dumped info — reliable or not — for decades, ThaiVisa, the branch pops up in posts and replies over a dozen times. And before February 2021, only one could even possibly construed as negative.
Routine, it would seem, in the Land of Smiles. Grease the right wheels here and things get moving along. The cost of expat life, one that I'm usually happy and willing to pay.
Nothing criminal there, to be sure.
Who these two bank gals were is a question I wasn't able to answer.
But it raised others — who were Mr. Frog's colleagues? What were their roles? When did they work there? How did they know Mr. Frog? Who were his victims?
At this point, I was kinda stuck. I had no idea.
Where the name of Mr. Frog had been published in both the Thai and English press, the names of others associated with the branch — either as colleague or client — were not revealed.
And maybe rightly so.
But you know as well as I that whatever you post online, no matter where or when, is there forever. Again, the internet just doesn't forget.
And as privacy concerns in the West have driven most of you reading this to bolster your privacy settings on Facebook and think twice before slapping something online under your name, the Thais generally haven't been so concerned about this.
If you're able to find a Thai's Facebook profile after wading through the myriad permutations of nicknames, spellings of nicknames in both Thai and English, and the like, then you're more often than not going to find a profile with a slew of public posts, photos, and data.
So, that's where I started. I wanted to know who Mr. Frog was by his Facebook. It's where I reckoned I'd find the clues I needed to understand his background and piece together the months and years leading up to this scam.
What did I search for first? His name.
The problems started here. Chaisit Sappermphool, Chaiyasit Sappermpoon, and other spellings of his name showed up in the outlets that reported the Pattaya bank fraud story.
Go and fish for any of them on Facebook, and you'll come back skunked, nothing in hand. Try explaining that to the hungry tribe that depends on your catch — or for that matter, a True Crime Thailand reader.
They want the meat. They want the goods.
So I kept fishing — I'm not one to disappoint, after all.
I searched for Mr. Frog's full name in Thai: ชัยสิทธิ์ทรัพย์เพิ่มพูน.
Yeah, nothing. Just a couple posts on Thai news outlets.
No profile. No fish. I was skunked again.
I went back to my first sources, the news articles published in both the English and Thai language press. His name kept showing up in the text in ways that weren't pulling up anything on Facebook.
And then I stumbled on one image that changed everything. This one photo cleared the way to a dozen paths that snaked through what I'd later find to be a swamp of information.
Mr. Chaiyasit Sapphoemphull, Assistant Branch Manager. Those three bullet points going down the left side are for various licenses — the first, an investment advisor license, is one he doesn’t have; the other two are for various life insurance products.
And you guessed it, the official way he transliterated his name into the Latin alphabet matched a profile on Facebook.
Nothing.
No posts. No profile picture. No likes. No photos.
Maybe he just didn't like social media. Or maybe Mr. Frog went back and deleted or hid everything public on his timeline as he got on with his crimes.
Funnily enough, I found an Instagram account where Mr. Frog posted one photo.
He’s pictured here with a former Pattaya Klang branch colleague in July 2018. His profile photo says something about being in Kuala Lumpur. Finally, you’ll notice Mr. Frog’s account has the nickname Big Kero. As far as I can tell, that just references some weird anime thing.
Look, I look at dead bodies and think about horrific crimes all day. But I have my limits, OK? I stopped right here with the Big Kero thing — I didn’t want to know any more about it.
Back to Mr. Frog’s Facebook profile then.
He may not have had much on this first Facebook profile I found under his name, but he did have something that I figured might help. A public friend's list — 186 of them as of this article being published.
I right-clicked on the first friend on the list, opened their profile in a new tab, and started scrolling. I wanted to find any trace, tag, photo, or mention of Mr. Frog.
I did this for about 20 or 30 profiles. Scrolling as far back as the browser would allow me, sometimes a year, sometimes five years. You might not know it, but the further down you scroll on a profile's timeline, the more resources your browser will hog.
I don't know why this is, but after 100+ posts, the browser starts to get buggy. It slows things down, even when running a halfway decent machine like mine (I won't brag about the specs, as I know I'd be outdone by some of my readers and put to shame).
After 30 tries, and no hits on Mr. Frog, no matter how far I scrolled and no matter how closely I scrutinized these random Facebook timelines, I decided I needed a break.
It was just about dawn, around 5AM, when I gave up on my first real night of research of Mr. Frog's Facebook friend list.
My head hit the pillow like an anchor dropped onto a parched & barren lake bed.
I was stuck. Moored in the center of an arid nothingness.
Nothing around could nourish my curiosity about Mr. Frog's background — details I knew must exist, and likely somewhere in the 186 profiles listed on his friend's list.
I needed a strategy to sort through the list. In desperate need for shut-eye, I closed them and let the Sandman lead the way into dream.
I woke up after my typical 4 hours of sleep and got cracking — back at the keyboard and Mr. Frog's empty Facebook profile.
As I hovered around his friend's list, a few trends became clear:
About 70% of his friends worked at banks, most of them listing Kasikorn Bank as their employer;
The vast majority of his friends were associated with Pattaya;
Nearly all were Thai, with a few key exceptions.
This third bullet point is one I will return to later on in the story — as one of the farang on Mr. Frog's friends list ended up being one of his victims, a clue to how he pulled off his scam.
The first bullet point ended up being very helpful as a starting point to whose profiles I would examine.
Don't get me wrong here — I don't find pleasure scrolling through people's information on Facebook. But if it's posted with privacy settings wide open, then it's not intrusive in an ethical sense. Anybody could have stumbled onto this information.
More importantly, I wanted the full scoop on Mr. Frog. And let's face it — this man, despite his cute little nickname, did some horrible things.
Mr. Frog defrauded hundreds of banking customers who trusted him with their personal finances, some their entire life savings and pensions, to the tune of hundreds of millions of baht.
With that fact front and center in my mind, I kept digging.
I started with profiles that listed Kasikorn Bank as their workplace.
After a half dozen profiles or so I got a hit. A photo of Mr. Frog in a profile of a woman who identified her work as Branch Manager at Kasikorn Bank.
For the sake of simplicity and anonymity, I'll refer to this female manager at the Pattaya Klang branch only as Ms. Pig.
Ms. Pig made a post on December 30th, 2020, to celebrate the coming New Year of 2021. She thanked her staff, other leaders, and customers at the Pattaya Klang branch that she managed for a great 2020.
But look in the background — you see those two customer service desks? Desk #12, keep a mental note of that. We’ll return to it soon enough.
Here’s Ms. Pig with bouquet in hand, pointing with Mr. Frog.
More pointing — this time Mr. Frog, Ms. Pig with birthday cake, and a random bank associate.
As it turned out, finding Ms. Pig’s Facebook profile was huge. Her posts opened up a chest filled to the brim with golden bits data that would help tell Mr. Frog's story.
At this point I recalled that there were several references to a female branch manager in news reports on the case.
One stood out in particular.
The branch bank manager told investors (off the record) on Tuesday that she had no idea about the situation and hadn’t asked any questions about the hundreds of investors queueing up to visit Mr. Gob at the start of each month.
As of Wednesday morning staff at the bank branch in the centre of this mess have been “instructed” to tell affected customers that “they will not be reimbursing the monies” as “the products sold to customers were not official bank products”.
As far as anybody can tell, this branch manager, by her own admission, knew nothing.
Ms. Pig didn't ask questions as to why hundreds of clients came to Mr. Frog every month — after all, what bank manager would? Who would expect the manager to keep tabs on the banking activity of her most senior direct report?
Silly questions, I know.
Look, I want to be clear. This story isn't an indictment on anybody — not on Mr. Frog, even though he's been arrested for these crimes; and definitely not on Ms. Pig, who has denied any involvement off the record.
Anything that is brought up for consideration in the story that follows is only done to raise reasonable questions on information that is publicly available.
With that out of the way, let's jump back to Mr. Frog's friends list.
Ms. Pig wasn't the only manager I found there. This is important because it became very clear to me early on that Ms. Pig didn't work at the Pattaya Klang branch where the fraud took place for very long — a few years at most.
And I'd later find evidence that indicated she had only served as manager at that branch since February 2019.
I'm getting off track here. The point of this section was to introduce you to Mr. Frog, and I've done a poor job at that task thus far — we'll have plenty of time to look at the others associated with the Pattaya Klang branch.
All in due time.
Oh, before I do that.
One more thing. The manager who was the manager before Ms. Pig took up the role at the Pattaya Klang branch in February 2019 — let's call him Mr. Tiger.
Ms. Pig, Mr. Frog, and Mr. Tiger — the latter's profile is where I found a great bulk of details that gave a timeline of who came to the branch and when, what roles they had, and various social outings that the branch participated in together.
In this photo, Ms. Pig receives yet another bouquet of flowers, and Mr. Frog hands a Parker pen gift bag to Mr. Tiger, who formerly managed Pattaya Klang.
Mr. Tiger's profile is also where I found Mr. Frog's other Facebook profile — in fact, it was tagged in this photo.
It’s a profile that actually has information on it. A lot of it — posts, photos, shares, and a bigger friends list of over 1,000.
So much info that it really became a hard task to choose what to include in this story and what to leave out.
I'll throw some choice samples at you here, to paint a bit of a picture of the man. And after that, let's reunite with the others — Ms. Pig and Mr. Tiger — and see how Mr. Frog got on with them.
First, the name on the profile: กบกบ ไอ้ตัวโต, "Frog frog, big body" — and there's another little word there, ไอ้, that can translate to: bastard, male animal, men of low status, or a way to call your male friends.
ไอ้ isn't polite, but it's not quite profane either.
This indicates that the guy at least had a bit of sense of humor about himself.
Moving on —
Mr. Frog's first Facebook post.
A pig saying "moo, moo" and the caption — แฮ่ๆๆ, "hahaha" in Thai.
Innocent.
That's how I'd describe that.
You probably didn’t make the connection, but this profile was created and this pig was posted right around the same time Mr. Frog was being charitable at the Pattaya Orphanage for New Year's in 2011 mentioned earlier in this story. That detail doesn’t mean anything — but I figured I’d point it out.
A few years go by and Mr. Frog doesn't post much, until we get to 2014 — and he starts slapping all kinds of content on his timeline.
It's a mixed bag.
There are the personality quizzes that were popular on social media around this time, inspirational and funny videos, news items. Not much in the way of personal updates or photos.
But along with the bog-standard Facebook timeline stuff, there's a healthy mix of gore, shock, car crash, and crime videos.
A fair warning, but some of the images below may be disturbing to some.
A video out of China of a young girl hanging from a high rise window, clinging on for dear life. The ending is predictable, of course.
Or this video of a double-murder by gunshot in Thailand.
Mr. Frog posted a controversial photo that's done the rounds on the Internet for nearly two decades — attracting the attention of the CIA, Scotland Yard, and the Taiwan government.
A man eating what appears to be a human fetus soup.
And two (hidden) photos of a corpse being consumed by flames on the pyre.
And a road crash, one of 1000's caught on video in Thailand — a motorbike getting wiped out by a wayward truck.
It's not all shock and horror on Mr. Frog’s page, though.
He posts this funny and sexy little clip of a teacher who shows more than what her students signed up for — much to their bemusement.
Mr. Frog was no stranger to the finer things in life, too.
International trips to London, Paris, Japan, Macao, Switzerland.
Saying hello from London. This becomes a point I raise later, but as far as I can tell, just about everybody Mr. Frog travels with works or worked at Kasikorn Bank, too.
Here’s a bit of shopping.
The post that I found most interesting from 2014 was when he shared a story about a farang who had been taken to the cleaners by a deceptive Thai girlfriend.
Now he found himself stranded and penniless on a Bangkok's Sukhumvit Soi 4 — begging for help to get back to him home country Sweden.
Ironic, that post.
Seven years later and stories are being shared of Mr. Frog deceiving his bank clients — becoming the baddie from his post — pilfering hundreds of millions of baht from their accounts and by selling fraudulent investment products.
Mr. Frog's thieving reportedly left one of his victims, a destitute and mentally incapacitated German expat, with nothing — not even enough baht to take care of his medical expenses.
The German's Thai wife got him into the deal. She was duped with a promise that after putting 2 million baht into Mr. Frog's hands, that her husband would receive an annuity paid out in 70,000 baht installments for life.
Kicking around Mr. Frog's Facebook profile, along with the other profiles of people associated with this branch, helped me put together this story in a couple ways.
First and most obvious, the treasure trove of details that people shared about the branch's operation with photos, dates, names, and the like, which helped to fill in key details about the background of the case.
Second, and maybe more valuable, a whole crop of questions rose up from the ground of my sleuthing.
And after giving it almost too much thought, that's how I've decided to tell the bulk of this story — all of the interesting clues and bits of detail that I've farmed, you'll get to know it through the inquiries raised as I encountered them.
Some of the questions I raise do have answers — some are answers I have, and some are answers that others might provide down the line after reading this story.
The point of this story is to raise the right questions and provide enough details about Mr. Frog to get others thinking about their solutions.
Without further ado.
When was Mr. Frog arrested?
At first glance this question isn't that important.
He was arrested, after all — and his schemes came to an end.
But after carefully considering everything known about this case, I think it might be one of the most important questions that we can find answers to.
Several sources have Mr. Frog busted upwards of two weeks before the news broke on February 2nd, 2021, when a group of foreigners filed an official police complaint.
One report in a German publication, Pattaya Blatt, says that Mr. Frog was arrested because:
… it was discovered that expired bank books and documents were being given to customers instead of being destroyed as required.
This is corroborated by the Bangkok Post, which wrote:
The irregularities were found when some of them updated their passbooks at other branches. They found the balances did not match what was shown in their passbooks. When they showed the passbooks and the transfer slips as evidence, they were told the documents were not the versions currently used by the bank.
Finally, The Thaiger wrote that on February 1st, the first Monday of the month, there were:
… hundreds of bewildered investors (who) visited the bank for their monthly 'roll over' and were informed that the assistant bank manager had been arrested 2 weeks ago by police.
From these reports, we can reasonably establish the following:
Mr. Frog went down because his customers tried to update their bank books at a different branch, and that branch discovered the fraudulent bank books;
Mr. Frog had 100's of customers who were invested in his fraud;
Mr. Frog's customers came to see him on the first days of the month to collect their interest;
Mr. Frog was arrested 2 weeks prior to February 1st, when his customers flocked to his branch for their investment payouts;
Pattaya Klang branch's customers were not informed by other bank management or staff of Mr. Frog's arrest or his crimes.
It's clear that the Pattaya Klang branch had two weeks to prepare for the hundreds of customers that were going to predictably line up to collect their investment payouts, like they had done every month before that.
To put it another way, the bank management and staff would have been well aware at this point by putting two and two together that the hundreds who showed up every month to see Mr. Frog had likely been defrauded with fake bank books, ledgers, and sums in their accounts, too.
And they would be coming soon — wanting answers, and more importantly, demanding their money.
It wouldn't have been any great secret that hundreds of people showed up to the branch every 1st of the month, for at least two years, month by month, to see Mr. Frog.
It's a wonder why no management or staff at the Pattaya Klang branch asked any questions about Mr. Frog's growing customer base or what banking needs he serviced for them.
That question remained a thorn in my side the whole time I looked at this case — why didn't anybody ask questions about Mr. Frog's activities after all this time?
How could they not have discovered he was giving out fake bank books and updating accounts that weren't real?
Then again, I didn't want to assume malice.
After all, Hanlon's razor tells us, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" — a fine principle to guide any investigation.
If the bank and staff didn't know about Mr. Frog's schemes, then maybe, just maybe, the branch management and staff didn't inform their banking customers of Mr. Frog's fraud because this came as a massive shock to them, too, and they were taking time to formulate a proper response.
Then it struck me — maybe Mr. Frog just didn't get on with the others at the bank. Maybe he was a loner. He did his job, crossed the right t's and dotted the right i's and never so much as raised an eyebrow.
He did his job. His customers left the bank happy — their pockets lined with monthly interest payments, or their accounts bolstered by rolling over on top of their principle investment — and thus none at the bank would have had the need to question Mr. Frog.
He did work at this branch for at least 10 years, after all. I reckon he was the senior most employee at this particular branch.
Was it true that Mr. Frog happened to be a loner, isolated from his peers, left on his own to develop the schemes that later came to light?
I had to answer this question.
I went to Facebook. I went to Mr. Tiger's profile.
Out of all the Facebook profiles I found associated with the Pattaya Klang branch, it was Mr. Tiger's that turned out to be the most resource rich mines of data.
Remember what I wrote before about Mr. Tiger — he was the Pattaya Klang branch manager until February 2019, when Ms. Pig took the reigns.
Mr. Tiger did seem to do a really good job at keeping his branch happy and was sure to never skip an occasion worthy of celebrating.
Here's the crew in September 2016.
On front right we have Mr. Frog, in one of the few photos out of hundreds where I actually found him smiling.
He's got a grin like a Cheshire cat there.
Mr. Tiger is the guy in the back — you know, the one with the tiger on his face.
Another quick note about the details of this photo. You see the sign that's above Mr. Frog's head? It's desk #12.
And it's this desk #12 that is referenced by one of the victims of Mr. Frog's scams as the desk that he went to when he spoke with the thieving assistant bank manager.
I linked directly to the time stamp, which starts at 2:02 — listen to the portly man with the dark Nike shirt.
Back to Mr. Frog — ultimately, many of the photos just place Mr. Frog at the bank with his colleagues.
I had plenty others like this from over the years.
Here's one where the scammer is celebrating Songkran 2018 at the branch.
And here's a group photo from the same Songkran, Mr. Frog, Mr. Tiger, and the rest of the Pattaya Klang crew.
All innocent. Nothing so far to indicate that Mr. Frog socialized much with others outside of work.
But sometimes the lines between work and play blurred with the teams at Pattaya's different Kasikorn Bank branches.
Whether it was celebrating a new promotion or a new team member at the branch, the party often went outside of work.
Management at these different branches liked to take trips together. Sometimes in Thailand, and sometimes internationally.
Mr. Tiger and Ms. Pig weren't left out of these trips — but on some trips, Mr. Frog is nowhere to be found. Maybe because he was just an assistant branch manager.
Here’s one photo taken in Japan in 2016.
Two random women, and then Mr. Tiger, who managed the Pattaya Klang branch, and Ms. Pig, who later took over that role from him in February 2019.
They seem rather friendly together, her arm wrapped in his.
Here’s another photo from the same trip, Ms. Pig and Mr. Tiger enjoying the cool air and fog in the background — an uncommon sight in tropical Thailand.
Here’s a photo from the following year, a whole gaggle of managers posing in front of Uncle Ho in Vietnam.
And the year after that, 2018, this time in Korea — and this time in traditional Korean garb — funny little hats and all.
Back on the home front, there was still plenty of socializing to be done for Mr. Frog.
Take this crowded photo taken with a group from Pattaya Klang.
This get together at the Hilton Pattaya in November 2018 was meant to celebrate a new associate that came to Pattaya from Hua Hin.
Drinks, eats, merriment — much ado about nothing.
Here's another photo of a branch outing to celebrate an internal promotion when one colleague left for a different branch.
Mr. Frog forgot to smile for this one — happy looking guy, ain’t he?
And it goes on like this, post after post, for several years going back in time.
The branch celebrating Mr. Tiger's birthday.
Mr. Frog and Mr. Tiger handing out gifts for Chinese New Year.
Here's a new year's celebration at the end of 2017 — where Pattaya Klang branch manager, Mr. Tiger, hands a 500 baht note to Mr. Frog.
And a photo of Mr. Frog with Mr. Tiger at a celebration of a prominent local hotelier.
And on and on and on.
Nothing that really points to Mr. Frog having any sort of social relationship with his colleagues outside of work-related events.
That is, at least when Mr. Tiger is running the branch.
It really does seem like Mr. Tiger ran a smooth ship during the years he guided the Pattaya Klang ship through the waters.
He enjoyed his time, taking trips as others did in Kasikorn Bank at other branches, holding celebrations for his staff, and honoring the traditions of Songkran, Chinese New Year, and other holidays at the bank.
Ms. Pig takes over his post as branch manager of the Pattaya Klang branch in February 2019.
It was this photo, in fact, which signaled the transition of power. Ms. Pig gets the bouquet and becomes Pattaya Klang’s branch manager, Mr. Tiger gets a parting gift, and he’s off to another Pattaya branch.
Even though Mr. Tiger took up a post at a different Pattaya branch of Kasikorn Bank, he still stopped by the Pattaya Klang branch and hung out with the old crew there.
The bunch at that branch were close-knit, it seems.
Less than a month after Mr. Tiger leaves Pattaya Klang, and Ms. Pig takes over the helm, the entire crew take a trip to Singapore.
And in May of the same year, Mr. Tiger, Ms. Pig, and Mr. Frog attend a wedding together — a golden affair.
That looks fun. There are a ton of photos, of course, and they’re mainly taken in groups.
But as 2019 wore on, Mr. Tiger doesn’t show up as much.
Instead, it’s Ms. Pig and Mr. Frog that are seen together.
By the way, when you see 291 on various shirts in these photos, that’s the number that Kasikorn Bank uses to identify the Pattaya Klang branch.
You can see that by going to the URL dedicated to that branch.
It seems like Mr. Frog and Ms. Pig got on together at these quasi-work gatherings, which doubled as social events — almost like pressure relief valves, giving the branch crew an opportunity to blow off steam and muck it up together outside the demands of the branch and its customers.
Here’s a photo of Mr. Frog, Ms. Pig, and a random bank employee out for a night on the town in Pattaya.
You see, it’s really when Ms. Pig takes the helm of the Pattaya Klang branch that Mr. Frog is seen socializing more and more outside of work events.
Take this photo from Loi Krathong 2020 at Le Maison Pattaya.
Mr. Frog, Ms. Pig, and a random.
This doesn’t seem related to work at all.
Again, the two seem to get on very well outside of work.
So well, in fact, they take photos together at cafes around Pattaya — Mr. Frog’s arm slung around Ms. Pig’s shoulder.
The photo shows the warmth and closeness the two shared.
It was taken in September 2020. It’s a confirmed fact that Mr. Frog would have been defrauding bank customers at the Pattaya Klang branch when this photo was taken.
It is very possible that Ms. Pig, the branch manager, never thought to breach the subject of all those hundreds of bank customers that showed up each and every month to visit Mr. Frog.
But she didn’t avoid the question due to not being close to Mr. Frog.
The two obviously knew each other well.
Why the subject wasn’t brought up is one question that deserves an answer.
But I've diverted from the point of this section, which I opened off by asking one question.
When was Mr. Frog arrested?
No exact date has been published, but the reports indicate that Mr. Frog was arrested two weeks prior to his schemes unraveling in the press on February 2nd, 2021.
Between the time of his arrest and the time of the reports of the situation in early February, the customers that once trusted this branch and Mr. Frog were not alerted to his scheme.
Is that reasonable?
Is it reasonable to think that nobody knew what Mr. Frog had been up to all this time?
Or that even after they were alerted to his scheme, they wouldn't have informed their customers — some who used that branch for all of their banking needs for over a decade?
All the times that Mr. Frog went out with his colleagues, at all those work-related functions, in the branch and outside, he was never once asked who those customers were that visited him every month? And why they were there?
It didn't slip from his tongue — maybe after a drink or three?
Maybe not. There's really no way I can prove that either way.
He could have kept his operation under wraps for the more than two years he ran it right under the nose of the manager, Ms. Pig, and other bank staff.
It's plausible that Mr. Frog could have pulled that off if he had his own private space, an office with door perhaps, that he could shut to keep leering eyes out of the ledgers he cooked as he stole millions.
That would make a lot of sense, actually. None of the other staff or management would have expected a thing if Mr. Frog had his own back office where he could do his customers dirty.
The only thing is, did that back office scenario line up with the facts?
Remember the first photo in this section from 2016 where Mr. Frog grins like a Cheshire cat, and above his head is the sign for customer service desk #12, the exact one that is identified by a victim as where he was serviced by Mr. Frog?
That's not the only photo I found of customer service desk #12.
From left to right: Ms. Pig, Mr. Frog, a farang, and his Thai wife. We’ll get to this farang and his wife here in a moment.
Behind them — desk #12.
A second photo from the same scene.
Desk #12 wasn't hidden away. The desk was in plain sight, in the wide-open. It’s even right next to desk #13, which seems to be staffed by another bank employee.
Even still, maybe nobody at the branch knew what Mr. Frog was up to.
Or if they did suspect something, maybe they just kept it to themselves — remember, Mr. Frog was the most senior associate at the branch. No need to upset an apple cart.
Even if somebody did ask Mr. Frog what he was doing, he could have just lied to them — giving them any number of excuses.
Any of those scenarios are plausible.
The facts remain — Mr. Frog stole hundreds of millions of baht through a variety of schemes that used fake bank books to keep his operation going as long as it did.
Nobody — staff or customer — suspected anything, and if they did, those suspicions didn't stop Mr. Frog.
And once they did learn of his crimes, nobody thought to contact the bank's customers.
Mr. Frog was finally stopped two weeks before the story hit the press and the majority of his victims wised up to the fraud when they went to collect their monthly interest payments in the first days of February.
One of those victims was the farang man who took the photo above with his wife, Mr. Frog, and Ms. Pig to celebrate New Year's at the end of 2019.
The farang and his wife are on the receiving end of a New Year's gift.
I didn't know he was a victim at first. But the more I looked at that photo, the more this farang looked familiar.
I recognized him from somewhere.
I went back through all the hundreds of photos and screenshots I'd collected, and after hours of digging and lured down other distracting rabbit holes, I found him.
He was on Mr. Frog's friend list.
He had socialized with Mr. Frog for years — both in the bank and outside of it — dinners, charity events, gifts at the bank branch.
He also happened to be in all of the videos of victims at the police station. So did his wife.
Finally, I found a comment under one of the news reports about this story with a username that matched the unique spelling of his name.
The comment detailed losses from Mr. Frog's fraudulent scheme and other bank account shenanigans of over 21 million baht.
This brought me to my next big question.
Who were Mr. Frog's victims?
After all the digging, I was able to triangulate a positive identification on one of Mr. Frog's victims.
He was in the photo receiving a gift at New Year's down at the Pattaya Klang branch from Ms. Pig and Mr. Frog, he was in the videos at the police station, and he was in photos with Mr. Frog.
I'll call this victim simply as Victim 1.
I had Victim 1's Facebook account, and I wanted to know how he got to know Mr. Frog. I wanted to know how they met, what Mr. Frog promised over the years, how he came to engage with this scheme.
Being the curious cat that I am, I went ahead and sent him a message.
As I kind of expected, he never responded.
I respect that — there's no reason to trust a random person sending a Facebook message about a criminal case that still hasn't reached a close.
It still kind of nagged at me, though.
Victim 1 and Mr. Frog seemed to know each other pretty well. The more I kicked around, the more I saw that Victim 1 liked many of the posts and photos Mr. Frog was tagged in. The two did some charity work together in Pattaya in 2020, too.
As it turns out, from the comment I found under one of the news reports, Mr. Frog stole over 21 million baht from Victim 1 — who from all appearances seemed to be his friend.
It turned out that Victim 1’s Thai wife was also Facebook friends with Mr. Frog.
Kicking around her profile, I came across a post that caught my eye. A series of unfortunate events that really drives home the fact of how much this family has lost.
On October 25th, 2020, the Thai wife of Victim 1, who I’ll refer to here on out as Victim 2, went to a temple to do some fundraising. In total, she was instrumental in raising 515,895 Thai baht.
Woo-hoo! Congratulations on the success. Victim 2 is there in both of these photos, the one wearing the black shirt.
Wait, what’s that? You noticed that, too?
Yes, that’s right. Victim 2 tags Mr. Frog, his “blank” Facebook profile, in this temple post. Why he was tagged, I’m not sure — he doesn’t appear in any of the photos. But if somebody held a gun to my head and forced a guess out of me, I’d say he donated money to the cause.
That Mr. Frog’s name was tagged here caught my eye and made me look closer at what happened after this money was raised.
Wait, what’s that? You want to know what 515,895 Thai baht looks like?
Here you go.
Now that’s an attractive tray. Loaded up with so much cash that it takes 7 pairs of hands to lift it up to the heavens — a truly divine tribute!
Four days after this fundraising, Victim 2 makes another Facebook post.
On October 29th, 2020, she shows off a gold monk that she purchases from Yaowarat Gold Shop (ขอบคุณห้างทองเยาวราช).
You might be wondering if that gold monk is solid gold.
It’s unlikely. But there’s likely some part of it that is solid gold — like the head, for example.
It turns out that Victim 2 comes into the possession of five of these gold monks.
How much their valued at, where she got the funds to purchase them, and if their purchase was some how related to the fundraising done four days earlier at the temple are questions that I can’t answer.
Maybe they were meant to be donated to the temple. That’s definitely possible.
Either way, the following day, on October 30th, 2020, Victim 2 posts that a lot of gold had been stolen from her bedroom.
In the comments, her Facebook friends ask questions about the theft.
Who did it? How much was stolen? Did she recover the gold?
In a series of comments, Victim 2 answers that:
Her gold jewelry and the gold monks were stolen;
The culprit was a Burmese wife of a repairman who had come to her home;
The Burmese woman smiled at a CCTV camera while committing the theft;
A gold ring and gold bracelet had been recovered, but the rest of it had been sold off.
The following day, on October 31st, 2020, Victim 2 files a police report for the theft.
It really hit me when reading this posts that this family had been struck by some serious unfortunate luck.
Not only had 21.5 million baht been stolen from Victim 1, husband of Victim 2, by Mr. Frog, but also a lot of gold had also been stolen right from their own bedroom just months prior.
Victim 2 really seemed to have a bad go of things in the past six months. A bunch of gold stolen and sold off by the wife of a Burmese repairman who visited their home.
And then a trusted banking friend — who she and her husband had known for years — was found to have stolen 21.5 million baht from the husband and their family’s accounts.
That’s a one-two punch that few could recover from. If it happened to me, I’d be reeling from the stress, anxiety, and feeling of violation that this sort of thieving can unleash on one’s psyche.
When the victims gathered at the police station on February 2nd, it was Victim 2 that took the charge in translating the concerns of the victims to police, and vice versa, translating the police advice to the largely foreign constituency of victims.
All of this made me wonder, though: how did Victim 1 actually meet Mr. Frog? Was it at the bank, just between the two of them? Or was it through Victim 2, the wife?
I reckon these are important questions.
One common theme from the news reports and forum posts about this case is that the Thai wives of the victims often were the ones who engaged with Mr. Frog in both the handling of their foreigner husbands accounts, and getting involved in the fraudulent investment scheme.
Sadly, as noted, Victim 1 hasn’t returned my message. And thus I can’t definitely answer this question in his case.
But I figured it wouldn't hurt if I searched for other victims. I started where it made most logical sense — Mr. Frog's Facebook accounts.
It seemed that Mr. Frog invested time in socializing with at least two of his victims. He built up trust with Victim 1 and Victim 2, which I'd guess likely led to Victim 1 making the decision to place the trust of his financial affairs into Mr. Frog's hands.
It seemed reasonable that Mr. Frog did the same with other victims. And he might have — but after many hours sleuthing and poking around multiple profiles from Mr. Frog's friends list, I came back empty handed.
It's a feeling that I don't particularly like. When I think there's evidence or details out there, I go to any length to find it.
When it's not there, it feels a bit like going to the night club and coming back home at 2AM drunk and alone, the double-fisted 7-11 Ham & Cheese toasties being the only warmth and comfort for the night — not that I know anything about that.
I didn't find any other victims socializing with Mr. Frog.
Like I said, there might be evidence of it out there. But I didn't uncover it.
There was still a strong case to be made that Mr. Frog cultivated strong, trusting connections with victims that visited his branch. He had a chance to build that rapport with them over the ten years that he served Pattaya Klang.
In fact, Mr. Frog's customers trusted him to an extent that they allowed him to manage their accounts — deposits, withdrawals, updating bank books, and the like — without much oversight or intervention.
Having full access over these accounts is what likely sparked Mr. Frog's deviance to hatch the schemes that eventually pilfered hundreds of millions from his customers.
The Pattaya Mail reported that:
The foreigners and their Thai wives filed complaints with Pattaya police Feb. 2, alleging that Chaisit Sapphoemphull stole funds transferred from overseas and duped them into investing in bogus mutual funds over the past year.
The Pattaya News further reported that:
The issue was discovered when some alleged victims of the fraud went to different bank branches and had problems with their account books, with bank staff stating that various slips or deposits were forged, outdated or incorrect and did not match their account balances.
From this reading, it’s reasonable to think that the root of the bank fraud started when Mr. Frog had full access to retirement accounts of customers at his branch, who trusted him to take care of incoming transfers and management of their accounts.
At some point in the past two years, Mr. Frog started updating the accounts and handing out fake bank books that should have been destroyed.
Here’s a photo of one of the bank books from the case.
According to press reports on this case, the bank books that customers had in their possession were outdated and invalid. In fact, Mr. Frog's schemes unraveled when some customers tried to take their unbeknownst to them phony bank books to branches other than Pattaya Klang for account updates.
A question charged forward to the front of my mind reading all this: how did Mr. Frog keep the scheme going this long?
By all accounts, the fraud happened over a period of at least one year. Some reports say two years, and others say several years — and the trust of how long Mr. Frog operated his schemes will only come out in time.
But no matter the exact duration of his crimes, he got away with it for longer than I expected.
How did Mr. Frog do it?
After giving it a lot of thought, it seemed that the simplest explanation was that he developed a great deal of trust with these customers, and they chose to do their primary banking exclusively at Pattaya Klang — and perhaps exclusively with Mr. Frog.
Good on Mr. Frog. If he wasn't such a deviant thief, he would probably get an award for excellence in service for the work he did at maintaining these banking relationships.
Oh, wait — he did get that award.
OK then. Kudos to the branch for winning the 2019 Star Award.
It's an internal recognition that Kasikorn Bank gives to various teams, branches, and individuals in its organization on an annual basis for excellence in a variety of categories.
It's not the first time Pattaya Klang won recognition with Star Awards. It's just a strange irony that Mr. Frog is accepting a Star Award with Ms. Pig while he is known to have been perpetuating fraud against his customers.
Again, the point is that Mr. Frog did good work.
It might be important to reiterate here that the Pattaya Klang branch was known as a go-to spot to settle one's international banking needs.
And with Pattaya being well-known as having a large foreigner population, with expats and tourists from every corner of the globe, it goes without saying that the Pattaya Klang branch would have benefited with more customers by providing this extra service.
Mr. Frog evidently benefited for a time, too.
There are several reports that say Mr. Frog swindled one Chinese man out of 130 million baht. This was an anecdote given by another victim who had lost hundreds of thousands of baht to Mr. Frog.
I want to be clear. I have not seen hard proof that a Chinese man lost 130 million baht to Mr. Frog's schemes.
It made me wonder though if Mr. Frog used that line to build trust with some of his victims. Even if there wasn't a Chinese man that handed over 130 million baht, it made for a good story, and could have been a detail that swayed others to hand over their hard-earned baht, too.
Combing through all the reports of the fraud, it seems that the average victim lost sums anywhere between a hundred thousand and 20 million baht.
But with the total number of victims being reported in the 100's, the amount that Mr. Frog was able to swindle in his post as assistant bank manager would have added up quickly.
It wouldn't be unrealistic to speculate that he stole several hundred million baht.
For some victims, Mr. Frog had full access to their retirement accounts here in Thailand, handling transfers, withdrawals, and updates to the bank books. He stole money out of these accounts and made it look like funds were still there by handing over fake bank books with phony sums in their ledgers.
For other victims, Mr. Frog went a step further and got them invested in a sort of Ponzi scheme that promised high-yield monthly returns of 3.5% on their principle.
Mr. Frog reportedly had hundreds of customers linked to both of these schemes. He managed a lot of retirement accounts, and he got plenty others involved in fraudulent investment products.
It made me wonder — the whole time that Mr. Frog was running these schemes, didn't other bankers in the branch service these accounts?
Was it only Mr. Frog that these customers went to?
Each time? Every time a customer came in, they went to Mr. Frog?
What if Mr. Frog was out that day with the sniffles?
Or if he was on a lunch break?
Did he schedule each and every one of these visits? Book them on the calendar, insisting that the customers only came to him once inside the branch?
And he did this for hundreds of customers, each and every time, over a period ranging from one to several years?
Maybe.
I mean after all, if each of those victims held fraudulent bank books, which should have been destroyed, wouldn't other bankers in Pattaya Klang have been tipped off that something wasn't right if they even took a peek at one of those phony ledgers?
Or saw that the sums in them didn't match with anything in the Kasikorn records?
Maybe he was just that good.
Mr. Frog could have convinced every single one of his customers to only come to him to handle their account needs, transfers, withdrawals, updating of their bank books.
And let's not forget the second group of victims, the ones that bought into the investments Mr. Frog sold them.
They rushed in "by the hundreds" at the beginning of each and every month to cash in on the 3.5% monthly interest that rolled in, according to reports.
And presumably, Mr. Frog acted completely alone at customer service desk #12, which was out in the open at the branch — not hidden away in some dim-lit back room — to service these customers that lined up to see him.
Mr. Frog encouraged his investors to roll that money back into their account to add on top of their principle investment. Compound interest and all that. This would have been better for Mr. Frog as he wouldn’t have to fund these payouts by defrauding other investors.
Some wanted payouts, of course, and Mr. Frog would have been obliged to give them their 3.5%.
The scheme worked a treat as long as more investors got in to add to the pot that Mr. Frog could pay from. It's not complicated, really, and it's the same way that Madoff got away with the $65 billion he swindled from his investors.
But back to Pattaya Klang — when Mr. Frog's scheme unraveled, Ms. Pig, the branch manager, told investors off the record that “she had no idea about the situation and hadn’t asked any questions about the hundreds of investors queuing up to visit Mr. Gob at the start of each month.”
By the next morning, staff at Pattaya Klang had been “instructed to tell affected customers that they will not be reimbursing the monies as the products sold to customers were not official bank products.”
Not official bank products, sure.
But they were sold at the bank, by an assistant branch manager, during bank hours, at a branch customer service desk, confirmed with bank books.
This wasn't done just once.
The payments presumably came in every month, payouts were made monthly either by cash payment or by rolling into the account to add to the principle, and Mr. Frog did it all with a smile from his desk at the Pattaya Klang branch.
It really makes me wonder if Mr. Frog sold these phony investment products with literature that used Kasikorn Bank's logo and style. Maybe time will tell, as happens often in these cases — people have a way to get information to me for follow-up.
It's very possible that Mr. Frog did all this alone.
He recruited hundreds of customers by building up trust with them over the decade that he worked there.
These customers entrusted Mr. Frog with their retirement accounts, which he defrauded and stole from without any scruples — leaving some of the victims that trusted him broke and penniless, some not able to afford their medical expenses.
And let's be clear. Not every single one of these victims got into the phony investment scheme. Some just trusted a banker who they'd seen at this branch for years and years to handle their accounts.
After building up his customer base — both in handling retirement accounts, and duping some into fraudulent investment products — Mr. Frog then hatched his scheme.
He very well may have done that alone, too.
After all, it's reasonable to assume that he knew the ins and outs of the banking system, how to hide funds, how to keep and use bank books that should have been destroyed to hand out to his unsuspecting victims, giving them the impression that their funds were safe in the bank.
And then he serviced each and every one of these accounts. Perhaps he did this alone, too. The hundreds that came to Pattaya Klang every month may have only went to him, each and every time, to settle their banking needs.
Not once did they go to another banker at Pattaya Klang, and if they did, maybe the banker just completely overlooked that the bank book they had in their hand was outdated — a fact that other branches seemed no trouble realizing — and that the sums in the ledgers didn't jive with what was in their systems.
Look, it is possible that Mr. Frog did all this alone — hatching the scheme, executing it, servicing every customer every time.
None of these questions make for an indictment on anybody at Pattaya Klang — except Mr. Frog, who by all accounts did do what the press has reported — trial pending, of course.
But after the money was relieved from these retirees, then what?
That brought me to my next big question.
Where did the money go?
Did Mr. Frog hide it all by himself, too?
I mean, it's a lot of money.
Hundreds of millions of baht.
The possibilities of what he could have realistically done with that much money seem limited.
He could put it in a Kasikorn account. Easy access and all that. But that would be too easy to trace. Too easy to tie back to him.
He could have taken the loot and bought gold. A lot of it. And kept it where? Pattaya Klang, I discovered, does offer safety deposit boxes at their branch — but how many of those would he need?
There's a chance he bought land, or gave it to friends and family, or burned it all up in a smoldering fire pit. Or splashed it all away at one of Pattaya’s infamous nightclubs.
As of today, when this article was published, there's no clear indication of what Mr. Frog did with the money.
At this point, I put myself in Mr. Frog's shoes.
What would I do if I defrauded hundreds of millions of baht?
I'd probably do a bit of traveling, buy a new computer, pay off some debts. And then I'd still be left with a pile of cash.
A new car? I'm not so sure. It'd look fishy.
That is to say, I know what I wouldn't do with the money — I wouldn't start flashing it.
And it seems that Mr. Frog practiced the same caution.
There's really no evidence that Mr. Frog went on wild spending binges during the time he operated his financial schemes.
And thus I will say it here and be as clear as possible: the money should be found and returned to the victims.
What about the people around him? They seem to have operated more or less the same as well. It's not like Mr. Frog was handing out large sums of cash, as far as I can tell, to people close to him so they could spend it for him. There's just no evidence for it, as far as I can tell, after combing through hundreds of Facebook posts.
With that said, I did find a few interesting details when I ventured out to answer the question of "where is the money?"
The first is fairly innocuous, but interesting in its own right.
That’s Mr. Frog there behind the guy in the orange pants.
Pattaya Klang teamed up with that guy in the orange pants to do a bit of charitable giving. All fine and dandy.
I found the story on an obscure Thai online publication. It identified the guy in the orange pants as a well-known Chonburi politician, Sansak Jaroon Ngamphichet (Thai สันต์ศักด์ จรูญ งามพิเชษฐ์). Former MP of the House of Representatives, former Senator of Chonburi, and former Deputy Minister of Public Health.
That's a hell of a CV.
There's an unfortunate photo of Mr. Ngamphichet standing right in front of Mr. Frog while the Pattaya Klang crew hands out eggs and mama noodles to the city's needy.
The Pattaya Klang crew enjoyed a bit of ice cream after doing the charitable heavy-lifting, and our boy Mr. Frog gives us the two-finger salute: known in the West as the peace sign, but known in Thailand more commonly as one of the universal selfie hand-signs; and some Thais mean it as "fighting" (Thai สู้ๆ, "su-su").
Fighting, indeed.
These charity photos were taken in May 2020. It's very clear that Mr. Frog was engaged in his thievery during this month. And yet he had time to give eggs and mama noodles to the needy.
Nobody can accuse the man of being completely heartless.
As innocent as these charity photos are, they don't add up to much when considering Mr. Frog's crimes — they're interesting, to be sure, but that's about it.
But they're not the only thing I found.
This photo was posted by one of Mr. Frog's friends at a law center in Pattaya.
The man in back? That's Mr. Frog, wrapped snug in his K-bank greens — and the unmistakable wrinkled brown slacks that he often wears.
Normal bank business, maybe. Coming down to sign paperwork with a client — showing that he has the business loans needed to open up a new bar and restaurant in Pattaya.
The guy taking the selfie opened up a bar-restaurant a few months later. It's a Japanese themed joint that's staffed with a fine line up of beauties.
And a few months after the first branch opened in Pattaya, the business opened a second branch in Bangkok, per a Facebook post by the guy who took the selfie above.
They must be doing well. Kudos to them — in no small part to those ladies, I reckon.
It's imperative that I make myself clear. I'm not suggesting that Mr. Frog's crimes have anything to do with him serving a banking customer who by all appearances opened a legitimate restaurant and bar business.
Mr. Frog did accompany the businessman to a legal office, wearing his bank's uniform, presumably on official bank business on behalf of his client. That happened — but it doesn't indicate any involvement with the crimes discussed in this story.
But it raises the question — could Mr. Frog have laundered money through some business venture?
It's where I would look.
After working in banking for over a decade at Pattaya Klang, I'm certain that Mr. Frog developed a good sense of how businesses work — particularly with their finances.
The fraudulent schemes that he executed at Pattaya Klang took planning and forethought. If he hatched the schemes and operated them practically without a hitch, surely he would've thought it through to the end — where would he put the money?
From what I can gather, some of the money must have passed through Kasikorn bank accounts.
Let's consider the retirement accounts that Mr. Frog handled for hundreds of his banking clients.
The funds were presumably transferred in from abroad into a bank account that Mr. Frog had access and control over. Whether they were accounts in the names of the foreigner bank clients is a question that would be hard to answer with the details privy to us.
But we can presume that the accounts were held under Kasikorn Bank, because Mr. Frog was the one who operated and controlled them — making deposits and withdrawals and printing bank book ledgers — from his position as assistant bank manager.
And if these accounts had money transferred through them from abroad, which Mr. Frog later misrepresented in ledgers printed in discontinued bank books, it would stand to reason that there's a record of where this money eventually ended up — at least to a point.
Were these funds transferred to another Thai bank account? Was that account in Mr. Frog's name, or another's?
Were these monies simply withdrawn at an ATM? If so, when, at what frequency, and for what sums?
At the end of the day, whether we find the victims careless or naive for entrusting their financial life to this trusted assistant bank manager, the fact remains: monies were removed from accounts held at Kasikorn Bank, by a Kasikorn Bank employee, wearing Kasikorn Bank uniforms, inside a Kasikorn Bank branch, with Kasikorn Bank computers.
And then we have these investments — paid out at 3.5% monthly.
Say what you want about the people that bought into them — I'll reserve comment about that until we know all the details, or I can interview a victim for their side of the story — but this activity was also done under the roof of the Pattaya Klang branch of Kasikorn Bank.
Too good to be true or not, they weren’t sold on some Facebook post spam or at the corner market from an Uncle who whispers a magical deal into your ear — no, they were sold and transacted at the Pattaya Klang branch, under its roof, at its desk, with a man who represented the bank as assistant manager.
When considering these facts, other questions bubbled up to the surface of my inquiry into this case.
They're questions I don't have good answers to, but I believe need to be asked nonetheless.
After all, I'm not writing this story to indict or prosecute this case. The goal is to lay out all of the facts that are publicly available, give a peek inside the operations of the Pattaya Klang branch, and a background of the people involved there.
Death by 1,000 questions
In this final section, I'm going to play necromancer and summon up lifeless questions — that is to say, questions that don't have complete answers.
Once summoned, it's my notion that some reader might have an answer — or even better, they may have better questions.
The real magic of True Crime Thailand happens when readers get hold of one of my stories and bring it to life with further lines of inquiry that I completely missed.
I'll start by raising up the one question that pestered me the whole time I spent writing this story.
How did Mr. Frog get these old bank books?
There's one report I found in Thai that said:
Mr. Chaisit was ordered to burn and destroy the bank books. But instead used them to defraud the victims, who trusted that what was printed in them represented the sums in their accounts, in spite of having no money them.
Is there a procedure to disposing of these books? Are there records? Did management at the branch sign off on their destruction?
Is there an audit of these bank books that were meant to be destroyed? If so, what does that audit say?
These questions are critical because without these bank books, Mr. Frog's scheme would be dead in the water — it would have been orders of magnitude more difficult for him to keep the schemes running, siphoning funds from retirement accounts, and keeping everybody smiles while he did so.
Maybe he'd get away with a couple million baht before somebody would have noticed it missing. That's what happened in a case in Uttaradit last year when a female bank employee embezzled 1.75 million baht from three bank customers.
They had deposited their funds in 12 month fixed-rate savings accounts, presumably legitimate bank products.
Mr. Frog's schemes took this sort of embezzlement of accounts he managed one step further. He made it seem that the accounts he managed were all fine and dandy by printing off fake ledgers in the outdated bank books, and handing those to the customers.
And this fact raised a whole other series of questions.
Who has access to the bank book printer? Are its transactions logged? Does a bank employee have to login to use it?
When deposits were made, did customers get receipts? Did these receipts match what was printed in the bank books? And are there records of these transactions in Kasikorn Bank's computers — that is to say, did these funds touch actual Kasikorn accounts?
And more questions about the bank books still —
Where does the bank book printer pull data from? Is it something that can be manually configured — say on Mr. Frog's PC — or is it pulled automatically from an existing bank account in the Kasikorn system?
Were others in the branch using the same bank book printer? Did they notice Mr. Frog using the printer for his customers, and if so, did they notice that the bank books he were using were old and outdated?
They had a lot of time to notice that, after all. And remember, it's not like Mr. Frog had his own office where he pulled this off.
It was all done under the branch's bright fluorescent lights at customer service desk #12.
I did attempt to find the answers to the questions I've raised about the bank books. As luck would have it, I have a contact that works at a Kasikorn Bank branch in Khon Kaen.
They were hesitant to share details of bank operations in writing, so we opted for a phone call instead.
They informed me that the old bank books are normally destroyed, and it's definitely not normal to keep them.
They said that the printer pulls information from accounts to print in the bank book — at least as far as they knew. They admitted they're not very tech-savvy.
At their branch, many people have access to the same printer.
The conversation more or less ended there as their own suspicions were raised about why I was even asking these questions.
Fair play.
But the questions remain. And the answers to them could very well add a lot to understanding this case.
There was also the question of how Mr. Frog found all his victims.
I discussed this in a previous section, but I found evidence that Mr. Frog might have employed recruiters that went out to find investors.
There was a post that said as much on ThaiVisa. He said that a couple of his neighbors fell for the scheme.
One being a Thai woman with an aged farang husband incapable of running his own affairs.
The Thai wife put in 2 million baht and expected monthly 70,000 baht payouts.
The victim tried to sell the scheme to the ThaiVisa poster, who politely declined.
I got in touch with this ThaiVisa poster and asked them a few questions about the case.
He told me that he didn't bank at the Pattaya Klang branch. He didn't recall any literature about the investment scheme. From what he recalled, payments into the investment scheme were to be made at the branch. And that it all happened about 3 or 4 months ago.
There's no way I can confirm this anecdote, but I want to include it, because there might be others out there that do have evidence of recruiters that Mr. Frog employed, literature that detailed the investment scheme, or other details that I'm missing.
Funnily enough, I tried to "drive by" the Pattaya Klang branch on Google Maps to see if I could sneak a peek inside and see if there were any posters or signboards displayed with information about the scheme.
Sadly, this is the kind of photo I could get.
This photo was taken in October 2020.
I tried zooming in, crisping up the photo, all the tricks in the book — but the Google street map car was on the wrong side of the road, and there’s just nothing I can see inside.
I kept hitting walls like this in my research.
As I laid out in the beginning of this story, intelligence gathering can be done through a variety of methods.
My primary method is OSINT — open-source intelligence sources, most of which can be found online.
OSINT did prove fruitful in finding a couple images that I thought prudent to share.
These two from Kasikorn Bank regarding suspicions of fraud.
“What to do when falling victims to scams,” the headline reads.
The answer: “Collect evidence related to the fraud and report to the police.”
Ironic that.
“Be Cautious!” this one exclaims. “#To Protect Your Assets, Be Aware.”
I don’t know why the hashtag ends up in this one — but whatever. Some questions really aren’t worth asking.
“Be Aware,” it cautions — good advice, truth be told. One should be aware even when in a legit bank branch, even.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot that I found online. But it has its limitation.
This is where HUMINT will add greater depth to this case. I'm confident that some reader out there who comes across this story will be able to surface info that could prove valuable in this case.
Another question pestered me, too.
Were these bank crimes only committed at the Pattaya Klang branch?
From all press reports, it does seem so. But branches often saw bank employees coming and going, bouncing between branches, as their careers advanced and to satisfy the needs of the company.
The management between the branches often got together, Mr. Frog included, for social and work outings, team building exercises, luncheons, and award ceremonies.
If it turns out that Mr. Frog indeed acted completely alone, I suppose there's nothing to worry about here. But I think it'd be prudent to open up further lines of inquiry into branches that Mr. Frog may have associated with.
And that might make you wonder, what's the status of this case's investigation as of the time this article was published?
There have been two major updates in this case.
The first was on February 2nd, when victims got together in a group to file official police complaints about Mr. Frog's crimes.
The second was on February 16th, when a group of about 30 or so victims got together at a meeting between investigators handling the case and Pattaya's prosecuting attorney.
The results of this meeting were as follows:
Because the sums totaled more than 100 million baht, the NACC (National Anti-Corruption Commission) will be involved to investigate money-laundering;
The 30 individuals who filed complaints and showed up to the second meeting all have unique aspects of their case, and thus police said they can’t generalize about how each will be investigated — they’re all treated as unique situations;
Some funds have been given to the foreigner who remains destitute and penniless after losing, from what I’ve gathered, more than 2 million baht;
If other funds are recovered, they will go to the victims;
A swift resolution is hoped for and expected in the case.
As of the date this story was published, there has been no public disclosure of any other funds recovered in the case or other victims given restitution.
Of course, I hope for a speedy recovery and for all victims to be made whole.
At the end of my inquiry, I’m left with the same questions that kept me up every night while thinking about this case.
Who is Mr. Frog?
What did he do with the money?
Why did he decide to steal so much from people that trusted him?
How did he pull this off alone?
As I said before, I know Mr. Frog loved international travel.
Mr. Frog in Korea in 2012 — in full regalia and toothy grin.
London in 2015.
Japan in 2014.
And again, Japan in 2016.
But a few months after Japan 2016, we have Paris 2016.
And on and on.
I never found out if Mr. Frog had any family. There are a few photos of him out there with people that don’t work at Kasikorn Bank, but none of them are identified as family; no mother, father, sister, brothers.
No wife, no partner — no kids.
His social circle, like many who move up the corporate ladder, seems to be directly tied to his work place at Pattaya Klang and other bank branches.
For all that he devoted to the bank, he still remained an assistant manager. And from what I can gather, he was an assistant manager for many years. He was either passed up for promotions or never took the initiative to move any further.
Mr. Frog seemed happy where he was. Or maybe happy’s not the right word — he was content. He did his job, day-in and day-out, building up a network of customers that trusted him.
Only to sabotage that trust and steal hundreds of millions of baht from them.
The people he worked with at Pattaya Klang seemed like his family.
In the day he toiled away at customer service desk #12, beneath the fluorescent lights, where he stole hundreds of millions of baht.
And outside of Pattaya Klang, he enjoyed his time with his bank colleagues.
He enjoyed his time with the manager, Ms. Pig.
Photos like these make me wonder how close Mr. Frog was with his colleagues at Pattaya Klang — how close he was with the branch manager, Ms. Pig — how much any of them knew of his fraud.
If they knew something, they should have spoken up.
That’s in the past now. Water under the bridge.
What they knew, and what they know now, is a question that can only be answered in time.
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