In a recent kidnapping case in Thailand, three men stormed a hotel in Bangkok's Din Daeng district and kidnapped five Chinese businessmen from their rooms. They posed as police officers and extorted the equivalent of about 2.5 million baht (about 488,000 yuan) from the five Chinese citizens. Shockingly, there was really the involvement of the Thai police in this case.
On April 29, local time, the Thai police received a report from five Chinese businessmen that they were forced to transfer 2.5 million baht of digital currency to the digital wallet of a man surnamed Su. After several days of investigation, on May 6, Ding Dan police arrested two suspects in the gang, Zhu Lin Su and Yang Qiujian, on charges of extortion, impersonating a public official, illegal detention and coercion, while Yang Jianqiu was arrested for accepting stolen goods. The investigation revealed that it was a kidnapping and ransom ring, led by Su Zhulin, and targeted Chinese citizens who had traveled to Thailand. Once the target is identified, the gang implements their plan as a police officer. The gang's crime process is quite tight, and it is difficult for the victims to see the flaws under the panic. When the victim contacts a Laotian gang to redeem a ransom with a credit card, one of the women in the gang prepares a card reader and meets the victim. After that, several other members of the gang posing as police officers will go into action, and Su Zhulin and Yang Jianqiu, both Chinese citizens, have already obtained Thai citizenship. They then detain the victim in a white Toyota Camry and threaten them with a 7-year prison sentence if they pay the ransom by swiping their credit card. At this point, the gang will provide a QR code that asks the victim to provide cryptocurrency and transfer it into the gang's digital wallet. After his arrest, Su Zhulin confessed to being involved in the extortion scheme, and he confessed that the person responsible for handling the cryptocurrency was Yang Jianqiu. When Yang Jianqiu gets the cryptocurrency, he will exchange it for Thai baht and distribute the funds to other gang members. The 34-year-old Laotian woman who was responsible for preparing the card reader was detained on May 4 local time. Further investigation revealed that there were 11 suspects in the case, and investigators have now obtained arrest warrants for 10 of them and arrested 7 of them, and the status of one suspect is still being verified.
According to The Nation, Thailand's second-largest English-language newspaper, the seven arrested include five Thais and two Chinese, including a current police officer working at the police emergency communications center and a former chief investigator at a police station in Bangkok who was fired by the police in 2023. The three fugitives are a 56-year-old Chinese citizen, a 26-year-old Thai and a 34-year-old police officer from Bangkok, and the police are actively pursuing them. On May 7, the staff of the Global Consular Protection and Service Emergency Call Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed the incident to reporters and said that they would continue to pay attention to the follow-up progress of the incident. (Orange Persimmon Interactive, Top News)
Source: Morning News