News Forum - Once bitten… English financial advisor who took chunk out of Thai investors

[Thaiger]

Foreign financial “advisors” have been defrauding the country’s ex-pats for decades. Does see the arrest of Briton Mark Kirkham mean that Thai economic police are finally catching up with them? Probably not, and why would you expect them to? Kirkham, according to financial blogger Andrew Drummond, looked every inch the upstanding member of the community on his arrest at a Bangkok airport. Unfortunately, this is the same Mark Kirkham who is accused of ripping off clients to the tune of 40 million baht, more or less a million bucks. Kirkham and his company, which included Andrew Wood, former financial columnist […]

The story Once bitten… English financial advisor who took chunk out of Thai investors as seen on Thaiger News.

Read the full story

[Davelee]

Ah yes white privilege at its best 

[gazmo16]

People can be dumb or greedy. T rying to make a big gains on their investments when common sense tells them it's too good to be true but they still go ahead and hand over their savings. 

Sorry I find it hard to have any sympathy  for some people . 

[Marc26]

I may look to be a financial advisor to expats and Thais down the road and unfortunately this stuff will be a massive hurdle 

 

My idea is more akin to being a "fund of funds" in a way

 

I've worked in the financial industry Ada a trader for decades

 

But what I would want to do is advise people to put their money with 4 or 4 different advisors and hedge funds I know

Investments that can suit them.

 

But as I said, with so many scams, it may be a tough sell

 

 

Fortunately I won't need the money to live on and it is something I'd enjoy doing, so if it worked great

If it didn't it wouldn't be the end of the world 

[Janneman]

Interesting. But what did he do wrong? Operating a company without a license? You go to jail for that?

Allegedly he is also accused of defrauding Thai of 40m baht. Defrauding? Or simply investments that went wrong? And being accused of something is a reason to go to jail?

I'm interested to read some more facts. Now it's just gossip. Not news.

[Fanta]

59 minutes ago, Janneman said:

But what did he do wrong? Operating a company without a license? You go to jail for that?

He is in jail because he is still under investigation and was refused bail. The RTP want to isolate him while they publish the story to raise awareness in the hope more evidence and more victims will come to light. It seems as if he took at least 40 million baht from people, didn’t invest it - call that theft or fraud - and hasn’t returned any dividends or any of the investment money. It appears as if he simply stole it. 

[Janneman]

If it is a Ponzi scheme then he deserves punishment. But there is literally nothing about what he did wrong in the article. Phrasing such as 'allegedly' 'it seems'  'it appears' dont mean much.

Without facts it sounds like gossip, not news.

[TeddY]

Question is, this scammer obviously knew that Thai police would be looking for him, so why did he come back to Thailand ? Did he want to get arrested, and why ?