HAVE THAILAND’S ‘BOILER ROOM’ SCAMMERS MET THEIR MATCH?

“ You fink (sic) you’re gonna shut shop?  Good luck with that then’

That’s what a saucy boiler room scammer told investigator Ken Gamble when his investigations led to closure of share fraud operations in Malaysia but now:

‘WOLF OF WALL STREET’ SCAM KINGS ARE BEING DE-THRONED IN THAILAND

A group of Australians and Britons, who were arrested for operating ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ share frauds from a house in the Bangkok suburbs in June, have now also been linked to a massive bond fraud in Australia.

The group, which has links to the foreign controllers of the core of Bangkok’s sex-tourism, nightlife, and cannabis industries, have scammed Australians out of AUS$8 million the Australian National Anti-Scam Centre reports.

In this fraud the scammers, described as having posh English accents (unlike the one quoted above),were trading under the name GIM Trading and offering low risk investment bonds, such as Canadian Government Bonds.

GIM Trading claimed it had AUS$52 billion in assets under management, an Australian Financial Service Licence, and was registered with the Australian Securities and Investment Commission and banked with the Australian Commonwealth Bank.

The latest scam was exposed today on ABC Australia 7.30.

The CEO of Global Investment Marketing turned out to be a ‘soft spoken’ New Zealander called Stephen Cubis, who said he was just a musician and admitted to ABC 7.30 that he was paid a A$500 weekly retainer retainer plus 1 per cent of money transfers. But Australian Federal Police have the identities of those who ‘managed’ him.

The actual investigation was the work of a team at IFW Global, a private Australian ‘Investigations, Intelligence, and Asset Recovery’ company run out of Sydney by Ken Gamble, which is now part of the Australian Federal Police JCP3, Joint Policing Cybercrime Coordinating Centre.

Both raids were operating under ‘Operation Firestorm’  co-ordinating with the Royal Thai Police.

IFW also provided the information for the raid in Bang Phli on the outskirts of Bangkok in June,where 11 people were arrested working together with their bosses, Briton Mark Howship, known as ‘Twitchy’ and Australian Mark Dennis, 54.

At least one of the GIM Trading company scammers is a Briton among those being held in Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Centre, and others scammers are expected to be arrested in Australia and Thailand. The latest reports come amid fears that perhaps full justice might not be served out to the scammers in Thailand given the poor local history of raids against boiler rooms.

In custody, after the joint Thai-Australian raid on a mansion in the Bangkok suburb of Bang Phli, the handcuffed British boss Mark Howship, best known as ‘Twitchy’, remarked cockily to an AFP officer: “I won’t be here for long.”

Time after time scammers have been released quickly from Thai and other southeast Asian jails, which was of concern to the Australian Federal Police and IFW Global.

The concern was that the operation could be ‘subject to local influences’, including in this case the wealth tied with influence of  ‘Twitchy’s’ ‘mentors’, the ‘Bangkok Five’ *- the five American and British scammers, who just before 2000 launched ‘boiler rooms’ in southeast Asia using Bangkok as a base.

(*The ‘Bangkok Five’ followed the career of Jordan Belfort* played by Leonardo di Caprio in the Hollywood film ‘Wolf of Wall Street’. After being arrested by the FBI, Belfort was offered a sweetheart deal to implicate his fellow scammers and subsequently spent only 22 months in jail. Belfort later went on to Australia, giving sales talks charging between US$30,000 -70,000 per seminar. Two of the ‘Bangkok Five’ died of drugs overdoses, one of them reportedly forced. One died of self inflicted gunshot wounds.)

Twitchy’s still alive mentors re-invented themselves as ‘legitimate’ businessmen and now control (1) the core of Bangkok’s tourism sex industry, (2) the greater part of the Bangkok cannabis trade including running their own plantation, and (3), a series of bars, restaurants, and nightclubs.

In the course of their ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion they handed their frauds businesses to Twitchy, from Farnborough in Hampshire, England.

He had been his star player at all levels of the business from being an ‘ao’ (accounnt opener) to ‘top loader,’ and had accumulated a large property portfolio originating with a villa in Lipa Noi, on the holiday island of Koh Samui,and a fishing park called Jurassic Montain, (pictured above) Twitchy was later joined by Mark Dennis, who had also worked for the same mentor as a banker – a person travelling through Asia and Australia to open bank accounts where fraud money can be deposited.

 

(Above:Thai CIB police video/news.com.au)  The scammers were caught at their desks.

A confidential report called Financial Vampires’ compiled by a forensic investigator in Europe, for certain eyes only, who has analysed the share-fraud ‘rooms’ dating back to the millennium shows how recent boiler rooms still lead back to the Bangkok Five. Scripts, templates, software, and methods of operation are identical and only modified to change company names, locations etc.

The leaders had cut their teeth in Bangkok but the people working the phones change.  Boiler room bosses advertise daily for new recruits to man the phones.

Floods of videos on YouTube depicting Thailand’s sex playgrounds such as Nana Plaza in Bangkok and Soi 6 in Pattaya, have led to no shortage of Brits and Australians desperate to stay in ‘paradise’ who answer Craigslist Ads for ‘telephone sales people’.

And many lose any principals they might have had when they see the cash they can make.

Australian Federal Police do not want the same result they got the last time they initiated a major raid in Bangkok against boiler room fraudsters,

Victims’ groups from Australia to Europe representing, a few of the tens of thousands of victims, claim that, apart from the scammers, the major beneficiaries have been Thai police and Army officials.

Switching cars to meet ‘The Generals’

The leader of one victims’ group, the Confederation of Defrauded Victims, said that his efforts came to a head after his representative had to attend a meeting in Bangkok (after switching cars twice) with four Thai army generals, and make them a better offer than they were getting. He couldn’t.

One of the four generals was displeased that the fraudsters had taken over of the core of Bangkok’s sex trade, controlling some a hundred sex venues, buty he was outvoted.

The last time, AFP claimed a triumph of international police cooperation against boiler room scammers in Thailand turned out in the end to be an unmitigated disaster.
That was in July 2001 when Thai police accompanied by both AFP and FBI officers raided the offices of the Brinton Group in Bangkok City Tower and arrested over 70 scammers, picking up the bosses later.

Most of the scammers were held at the Immigration Detention Centre. And soon they were deported, not to their home countries, but neighbouring countries, without even being banned from Thailand. So, some of them were virtually back on the next plane.

Suspended sentences

And after three years, which they spent free but on bail, fraud charges were dropped against the bosses, who were only given two year suspended prison sentences and fined just 200,000 Thai baht each (US$ 6,280.00) for breaching Thai Security Exchange Commission regulations and running an unregistered financial company.

To add salt to AFP’s wounds, after leaving any further investigation to the Thai authorities, AFP and ASIC had effectively allowed Brinton cash, which had been frozen in accounts in Hong Kong to be released, because local police said no Hong Kong or Chinese citizen could be found as a victim, reported the South China Morning Post.

Humiliation followed when Australian authorities soon had a member of the ‘Bangkok Five’ in their hands in a police cell on their home turf in Brisbane.

Another suspended sentence

Paul Richard Bell, the grand-daddy original member of the ‘Bangkok Five,’ who had already been banned from operating in the United States, was arrested and held in 2001 shortly after the Brinton raids on 21 charges brought by ASIC – relating to cold-calling Australians from Thailand and the Philippines. He was convicted but only received a six-month suspended prison sentence and fined AUS$12,000.

‘This outcome shows that ASIC is determined to pursue share cold-callers who come to Australia, in addition to assisting Asian regulators shut down and prosecute cold-callers in their countries,’ ASIC’s Executive Director, Consumer Protection, Peter Kell said afterwards.

Bell duly returned to Thailand where he was photographed joining the local Pattaya branch of ‘Optimists International’ run by another American fraudster Drew Noyes, who later was allowed to flee Thailand after being convicted and sentenced to three years in jail for extortion. (Optimists International disassociated themselves from the Pattaya operation). Bell was the one member of the Bangkok Five who died of natural causes.

While the latest operations relied heavily on IFW Global, Ken Gamble’s operational style takes a different approach and its success was born out of the average Australian victim who had become frustrated at the lack of willingness by AFP to push on crimes committed abroad and a similar lack of enthusiasm of the Australian Securities snd Investment Commission in penalising fake companies and alerting the public to scams.

Gamble is well aware of the pliability of some forces in southeast Asia and conducts investigations with ‘straight’ detectives, or anti-corruption authorities. But his primary purpose is to get cash back for his clients, and his success in that sphere appears to have been remarkable.

While there similarities to boiler rooms run by the ‘Bangok Five’ the scammers have advanced their game, says Ken Gamble.

“It’s more sophisticated. It has been fined tuned to the point where it’s almost the perfect crime,” he said.

“This was one of the most sophisticated frauds that I have seen in this area of bond frauds.

“It was impossible almost for any investor doing due diligence to find anything wrong with this company without hiring a professional. Everything appeared to be very legitimate.”

Whereas before,the scammers moved their cash from bank to bank to bank, now they can conceal it even better by converting it to crypto currency, which is what the Bangkok based scammers were doing.

Despite some reservations they may have had AFP and IFW are glad about the charges currently being brought about against the six Britons, five Australians, a Canadian and South African, being held in custody which are as follows:

1. Being members of a secret society and foreign nationals working without a work permit, and being foreign nationals who, while granted temporary permission to stay in the Kingdom, engaged in an occupation or employment without authorization;
2. Jointly participating in a transnational organized crime group;
3. -Being members of a secret society as leaders or managers of such a group;
4. -Being a band of robbers; and jointly, by fraud or deceit, importing into a computer system any distorted or falsified computer data, whether in whole or in part, or any false computer data, in a manner likely to cause damage to the public.
5. Being members of a secret society and foreign nationals working without a work permit, and being foreign nationals who, while granted temporary permission to stay in the Kingdom, engaged in an occupation or employment without authorization.

-Jointly participating in a transnational organized crime group;
-Being members of a secret society as leaders or managers of such a group;
-Being a band of robbers; and jointly, by fraud or deceit, importing into a computer system any distorted or falsified computer data, whether in whole or in part, or any false computer data, in a manner likely to cause damage to the public.

 

 

 

Dennis who is currently wanted in Australia for money-laundering to the tune of AUS$2 million plus, ran a bar in Bali popular with Australian Rugby Football (‘footie’) fans.

Howship, Dennis and the eleven others have been detained, not in Bangkok Remand Prison but the Immigration jail in Suan Phlu, Bangkok.

One of the former Brinton Group. whom I contacted by phone said:

“Its odd. I was told they were going to be deported. They are in cell together. Conditions are not good. With their contacts they should have been out by now. It looks like pressure is coming from the Australians.”

It has been however reported within usually reliable circles that at least one of the scammers, a banker’ has made his way to Spain. But it is not specified if he was one of the group arrested on organised crime offences which carry a 15-year-jail sentence, or whether he was not present at the time of the raid.

Mark Howship has refused to talk to Australian Federal Police officers but has received British Consular assistance.

Operation Tropicana

Finally, it’s worth looking at Operation Tropicana. This was an operation by Ken Gamble and his IWF and Malaysian Anti-Corruption Police in Kuala Lumpur two years ago. (Fraud Police were avoided)

The leaders of this operation, Andrew Mark Peters (Peg-leg Andy) and Darren McNicholas, from Milton Keynes, also had links to the ‘Bangkok Five’ during the same period Twitchy was running rooms in Pattaya. Thailand, Kuala Lumpur and Penang in Malaysia and later Jakarta, Indonesia.

(Twitchy was well known in Jakarta, particular in Paul’s Pub in Jalan Jaksa in Jakarta.)

IFW claim operations were responsible for not millions but billions of dollars in fraud cash. In the Andy Peters/McNicholas operation in Kuala Lumpur. Ken Gamble had invited 7 News Australia journalists of ‘Spotlight’ to follow their operation.

The resulting programme was dubbed ‘The Investigation of the Year’ by 7 News.

At the time of the arrest one prisoners remained particularly defiant (End of the video at 41 mins 06 seconds to 41.20). The ‘Spotlight’ commentary on the programme described the British scammers as being ‘posh’ and having cultured accents. This guy must have been an acception.

Detainee: “You fink you’ve got this whole fink (sic)  right? You fink you’re gonna shut shop?
Ken Gamble: “Well, we shut this one. Then we’ll get the next.
Detainee: “Good luck with that then.”

 

 

Operation Tropicana was done and dusted in the space of a month. The arrests were made on 21 February 2023 and the bosses pleaded guilty and were sentenced on March 18 – a court speed record

.

The ‘Spotlight’ team filmed victims of the of the scammers expressing their delight at the outcome of the Tropicana raid. But they would not have been pleased at the ultimate court result.