Stephen Leather - Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye - True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson

I phoned Mike and the guy was at the end of his tether. It was too late to send the money but the next day he was going to be at the bank first thing to arrange the telegraphic transfer. I told him to wait until I’d made a few enquiries, there were just so many things about this case that didn’t ring true. I pressed him for more details about his internet courtship. He told me that he’d first met her in a chatroom, and they’d started talking by email every day. She was working as a waitress in Bangkok but after Mike started sending her money she’d gone back to stay with her parents in Chiang Rai, helping to support her younger sisters while she studied for a degree in accounting. It had always been her dream to live in England, she’d said. They’d traded photographs, and Metta had told Mike that he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Like a movie star, she’d said. And she loved the photographs of his large house in central London. His thirty-two-foot yacht. His collection of sports cars. Her email began to become more affectionate. Maybe she could fly to London to see him, she’d suggested. Maybe they’d get on so well together that he would want her to stay with him. Maybe he might one day want to marry her.

By the time Mike had finished telling me the story, he was in tears. I told him not to do anything until he heard from me again.

I picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and went along to the Immigration Department on Soi Suan Phlu. The chief there was an old friend of mine. I went up to the third floor, gave him the whisky and then we spent half an hour talking about golf before I got around to the real reason for my visit. I showed him the fax of Metta passport and he shook his head emphatically. ‘ Mai chai, mai chai, mai chai,’ he muttered.

He pointed at the passport picture. Metta was smiling happily. The chief explained that smiling wasn’t allowed in passport photographs. They were taken in the passport office and the camera operator would make sure that the person didn’t smile. Also, the wavy lines that were supposed to run through the photograph were missing, and the surname was in a slightly different typeface to the rest of the wording on the passport. It looked to the chief as if the photograph had been stuck into an existing passport, and the surname had been typed on a piece of paper and stuck into the travel document. The passport was fake.

I asked him what would happen if the girl tried to leave the country with a doctored passport. Would she be arrested?

The chief assured me that the girl would probably have just been turned away. If she had been a known criminal then she might have been held by the immigration police, but she certainly wouldn’t have been hauled off to the Bangkok Hilton. To put my mind at rest he tapped the name into his computer terminal. There was no record of any problems with a Metta Khonkaen.

My next call was to the municipal office in Pathumwan. I was a regular visitor and whenever I popped in I took a selection of Thai snacks with me. The head lady saw me coming and came over to relieve me off my tidbits and see what I wanted. I asked her about Metta’s surname and she shook her head emphatically. Khonkaen was not a surname that she had ever come across and after a couple of minutes on her computer terminal she was able to tell me that there wasn’t a Khonkaen family anywhere in the country.

I waited until late evening before phoning the unlucky Mike and told him what I’d discovered. And I told him of my suspicions-that Metta Khonkaen, or whatever her real name was, was conning him.

Mike was still convinced that there was some sort of misunderstanding. He was still getting frantic emails from Metta’s friend, imploring him to help her and he was convinced that she was banged up in a damp, dark cell somewhere.

I told him that I could get proof that he was being taken for a ride and asked him to send me another 10,000 baht. Then I told him to tell Metta’s friend that he would send some money to the Western Union office on Sukhumvit Soi 22 the next day.

I was outside the Western Union office with my camera and long lens just before it opened. It was on a busy road but I was able to sit at a duck noodle shop with a perfect view of the shopfront. I didn’t have to wait long.

A black Cherokee Jeep pulled up in front of the office and a middle-aged Isaan woman wearing a gold chain around her neck as thick as my thumb climbed out of the passenger seat. She went into the office and spoke to the girl behind the counter. The woman produced a passport and signed a form and was handed a bundle of banknotes. I managed to get a few good shots of her grinning as she counted Mike’s money.

As she walked out of the Western Union office and headed towards the Jeep, half a dozen policemen in brown uniforms rushed over to her. At the same time a police car screeched to a halt in front of the Jeep and four police motorcycles pulled up behind it. I took a few more photographs with the long lens, then went over to shake hands with the police colonel who’d planned the arrest. The driver of the Jeep was a farang in his sixties, a bald head and heavy jowls and thick-lensed spectacles. He had a gold chain around his neck as thick as the one the woman was wearing.

The woman was crying and telling anyone who’d listen that the farang had made her do it, that he was the one who prowled around internet chatrooms and sent emails to gullible men around the world.

The farang and the woman were regular visitors to the Western Union office, the colonel told me, and in the last month alone had collected a quarter of a million baht from a dozen or so ‘sponsors. They were handcuffed and taken away. The money that Mike sent was handed over to me and I signed a receipt for it. I went back into the Western Union office and cabled it back to Mike, minus my expenses of course.

I phoned him when I got back to the office. I didn’t take any pleasure in telling him that his beloved Metta was a sixty-five-year-old Belgian scam artist, and the photographs that Mike had framed and hung up all around his house were of a well-known Thai soap opera star. He took it quite well, I thought, and thanked me for saving him from making a complete fool of himself.

Mike said that he’d learned his lesson and that he wouldn’t be going near internet chatrooms again. In fact, he decided that he’d come to Thailand himself. He asked me if I’d find him a girlfriend, someone who wouldn’t rip him off. I put him in touch with a reputable dating agency run by Nung, a good friend of mine. When Mike flew over three months later, Nung fixed him up with a few possibles but none took Mike’s fancy. Mike wanted to go travelling around the country and the girls that Nung introduced him to weren’t happy about sharing a hotel room with a farang they had only just met. I decided to play Cupid and went to a beer garden in Soi 7 and after a couple of hours stumbled across Riang, a thirty-five-year-old mother of two who looked twenty-five, pretty and with a good sense of humour. I ran the Mike situation by her and she jumped at the chance of a free holiday, especially if Mike would agree to take her back to her home in Phitsanulok for a couple of days so that she could see her kids. To cut a long story short, they got on like a house on fire. A year later and she was his wife and she and her kids were living with Mike in central London. All’s well that end’s well, that’s what I figure.

It was a story I’d heard a hundred times over the years in one variation or another. Dang had been born in small village in Khon Kaen, one of six children. Her parents eked out a living on a small rice farm that they leased. Dang was a good student but her options were always going to be limited. She was pretty with a cute smile and she attracted the attention of a good-looking boy who was a few years older. One thing led to another and she fell pregnant just before her seventeenth birthday. Both their families were poor but respectable and the only way for Dang and her boyfriend to save face was for them to elope. They packed a few clothes and caught the bus to Bangkok. The boyfriend had a relative who worked in the Patpong red-light district, and as they had no money and no qualifications Dang had no choice but to start work in a go-go bar. There’s no social security safety net in Thailand. If you don’t work, you either starve or rely on charity. So Dang started dancing around a silver pole and her boyfriend worked as a tout, standing in the street trying to lure customers inside.