Thai cybercrime suppression officers have arrested nine Thais and one Myanmar citizen, alleged to be members of a Chinese-run call centre gang which made over 700 million fake phone calls in the first six months of this year and sent one million fake online messages in just three days to their potential victims using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunk technology, according to the Technology Crime Suppression Centre.
Pol Lt-Gen Thatchai Pitaneelaboot, the assistant national police chief and deputy director of the Anti-Online Scam Operation Centre, told a press conference today that the crackdown on the call centre network came after an intensive police investigation into the unusually high frequency of phone calls attempting to defraud members of the public.
It was discovered that most of the calls came from telephone numbers with the first two digits being 02. A total of 11,201 office phone numbers, beginning with 02, were subscribed to by three Chinese firms.
They are Ruan Yun Information Technology, which subscribed to 3,000 office phone numbers and recorded more than 256 million call attempts from January to June, Yoon Tian Ker Technology (Thailand), which subscribed to 6,000 phone numbers and recorded more than 345 million call attempts, and Prima Technology (Thailand), which recorded over 128 million call attempts.
Pol Lt-Gen Thatchai said that further investigation shows that none of the Chinese executives of the three firms have ever entered or left Thailand, with only one relevant Chinese national leaving Thailand on August 7, without returning.
Police have sought warrants for the arrests of 24 suspects, including three Chinese nationals, one each from Singapore, Malaysia and Myanmar and three Laotians.
Only ten, including nine Thais and one Myanmar citizen, have, however, been taken into police custody so far. All were charged with defrauding the public, money laundering, being members of an organised crime group and violations of the Computer Crime Act.
Pol Lt-Gen Thatchai said that the use of phone numbers staring with 02 tricks the recipients into believing that they are local calls, but most of the calls actually came from Thailand’s neighbouring countries.
He also said that the call centre gang used unofficial base stations to send messages to their potential victims, adding that such a base station was found in a car travelling along the busy Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok while sending the messages.
