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Topics: Crime, World News, Thailand
Harley Young
Topics: Crime, World News, Thailand
A Thai fraudster who was sentenced to a whopping 13,275 years in prison is only expected to serve two decades for his crime.
Pudit Kittithradilok, 34, was jailed following failure to return investments to those inputting money into his business.
He admitted that he was running a Ponzi scheme where investors were promised high financial returns which, of course, turned out to be false.
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Around 40,000 people were persuaded to invest in his business, pouring over £120m into his chain of companies.
The courts ruled that he had engaged in illicit lending with a huge 2,653 counts of fraud to his name. However, as he confessed to his crimes, his ginormous sentence was chopped in half to a still rather sizeable 6,637 years and six months.
Despite the massive number, Kittithradilok is unlikely to serve more than 20 years.
This is due to a Thai law that places a maximum of 10 years imprisonment for each of the two crimes of which he was convicted.
Prosecutors explained how Kittithradilok had gotten away with his crimes until now, telling the court that he had organised a series of seminars where attendees were encouraged to invest their savings into his pair of businesses.
He said the businesses were liked to things like property development, beauty, car trades and experts and other things but these claims were false.
According to the Bangkok Post, Kittithradilok promised investors large returns and incentives for introducing new members to the scheme.
Like most pyramid schemes operate, the aim of these new cash injections would be to pay off the earlier investors and so on and so forth.
Kittithradilok has since been held in Bangkok Remand Prison following his arrest in 2017, when he was denied bail in August of that year.
The court ruled to fine his two businesses $20 million each, leaving him and his firms to repay $17 million plus 7.5 percent yearly interest to the victims identified.
The conman is due to be released in 2037 following his 20-year sentence.
According to PwC’s Thailand Economic Crime and Fraud Survey 2020, there has been a drop in financial crime over the past few years since 2018.
Though the website states: "This could indicate that fraudsters are winning the war by evolving their methods and using new technologies to breach defences. So we believe a lot of fraud is going undetected."