The fallout of the SPM Shopping Mall app scam continues and police around the country are being swamped with official complaints from aggrieved victims, some who lost hundreds of thousands of baht.
Police claim to have already started arresting people involved with the scam, or who may have been facilitating or encouraging others to join in the pyramid scheme.
So, how did people become caught up in the Shopping Mall scam in the first place?
Because, on the face of it, the whole thing had an air of legitimacy. The app appeared very professional and the idea of getting paid to click on products in order to push up their SEO is not new.
Some schemes like this in the past were quite legitimate and some still exist where reviewers are rewarded for positive clicks.
But there were a few red flags with the Shopping Mall app.
Firstly the amounts of money they were offering in return for clicks was very high. The promise of paying participants between 10 – 14 days also had the hallmarks of a classic Ponzi scheme where the monies received from new participants are used to pay the older ones.
The pyramid scheme is where participants are asked to invite others, usually friends, into the scheme, where they will then earn commission from the people they introduce.
Then they will earn a proportion of the commission of the people THEY introduce and so on down the line.
But this is also fairly common. International companies such as Amway and Herbalife have been trading like this for decades and are NOT scams. (continued below)
Finally, the messages that started coming from the Admins on the Line croups started to increasingly frantic pushing people to invest (indeed) more money into the scheme to make sure they could click on more of the shopping list items.
In the defence of the people that did get involved, they were often invited to get into the scheme by their family or friends, sometimes with true stories of success and big earnings… certainly for the people that were involved in the early days and were at the top of the pyramid.
Their assurances and examples of big wins would have been difficult to ignore, even if you had a few niggling suspicions. And for many, their wages had been cut or they’d lost their job during the pandemic… they were more likely to take a risk.
And besides – think about other online success stories in the shape of Facebook, Amazon, PayPal and BitCoin. Who on earth would have bought a BitCoin for a single dollar 20-years ago. But, if you did, it is now worth 30,000 dollars.
So these online opportunities can, and do, work. Even if we do not fully understand how. But only is they are operated honestly and by decent people.
If YOU have lost money from this scam, the best you can do now is file an official police complaint and contact your bank to see if you can block any recent money transfers.
You can also pressure the police, your MP and the Thai government to hold the banks responsible.
Because the scammers were known to be using Thai bank accounts to facilitate their scam.
And this equates to international money laundering for which they should be held accountable. Criminally, if possible.
Don’t let the bankers get away with it – Source / The Thaiger
