About 50 people have accused a company of fraudulently luring them into investing money through its five LINE chat groups, with a promise of high returns.
In fact, they received nothing back and lost about 100 million baht in total they said when lodging their complaint against Siam Real Group Co on Tuesday with Pol Maj Gen Surachate Hakparn, deputy commissioner of the Tourist Police Bureau, at the Royal Thai Police Office.
Their leader, civil servant Pasitorn Vivatwanpreecha, 40, said she had been persuaded by friends to invest money with the firm, which offered a 45% return on investment per month, or 1.5% per day.
Those investing 10,000 baht were promised a return of 4,500 baht a month, Ms Pasitorn said. She had invested 30,000 baht. The firm asked her to communicate via its LINE chat group.
She later learned that the firm had five LINE investment chat groups, each comprising 500 members. Anyone who introduced new investors was promised a bonus of 1,500 baht per head. She and other interested people were asked to transfer their money to the firm. The size of investments varied. Some people put in as much as 100,000 baht, Ms Pasitorn said.
Before investing, she had checked and found that Siam Real Group was legal, with registered capital of one million baht.
All members were told that they would get their first returns one month after investing. The firm posted figures online it said represented total investment by its members, and returns, that kept rising every day, she said.
One month after investing, the complainants received none of the money promised. The firm cited system errors as the reason, and asked for one week to fix it, she said. It then closed down all its LINE chat groups.
Pol Maj Gen Surachate said the RTPO’s information technology crime suppression centre would look urgently into the alleged investment fraud. There had been similar cases before and police had arrested those involved.
An initial investigation found there were three people involved in the company - one Turkish national and two Thais, he said. Police were trucking down those suspects.
