Bank of Thailand freezes 3M accounts, sets daily transfer limits to curb fraud
123 comments
·September 14, 2025mlinhares
I was once explaining to someone in the US why transactions in Mexico and Brazil take a tumble and start to be rejected at a much higher rate than usual due to banks being more stringent after 10 PM as its much more likely these would be fraud/scam/crime in general in these countries and they were amazed that this was a thing.
Its sad that these scams are so widespread today that a heavy handed approach like this is necessary. Unfortunately doing these attacks is incredibly cheap :(
kattagarian
It's probably one of the biggest criticism about PIX, the Brazilian method of transferring money: it's too easy. Early on, kidnappers started taking people off the streets and forcing them to transfer all their money, because victims had no choice but to give their password, and there was no limit on the transfer amount.
catlikesshrimp
Criminals always find a way Decades ago, there was a popular activity called "Paseos Millonarios" (More or less, Millionare Rides) where criminals at night picked up a victim coming out of an ATM, and took him to several other ATMs around, everytime drawing non-suspicious amounts of money. The criminals didn't even need the PIN. They neither entered the ATM hut because only the card holder was sent in.
The final solution was disabling the ATM network durimg night, except the ones located in safe places. Showing you are drawing money in a hurry in a lone hut in the night was a bad idea, anyways.
ryandrake
Many highly-sophisticated technical solutions are still vulnerable to the "wrench attack". https://xkcd.com/538/
Unfortunately, whenever governments try to solve the wrench attack, they do so by removing the end user's control over their own stuff.
dkga
Yes, but the Central Bank of Brazil caught up quickly.
jajko
Unlimited amount? Sure, I can easily see some non-standard situation where its very beneficial (ie once-a-decade home reconstruction). But only on a limited account having only the amount I don't mind exposing, which normally is very low.
esafak
To me it suggests they don't have the technical- and financial means to detect fraud.
dlisboa
Unfortunately the number of different financial scams is the highest in the world in these countries. US and EU the banks wouldn’t have the capabilities either, it’s simply too much to deal with. You can’t flag everything as fraud.
It’s also a different kind of enemy. The biggest crime organization in Brazil has switched their primary focus from drug running to financial scams. They invest millions and set up legitimate companies with hundreds of employees to facilitate these schemes.
hyperliner
[dead]
fryry
I live in Thailand, many expat accounts have been closed down, making it very hard to pay bills etc. in the country. That will form part of the 3 million. Huge overreaction that will dent the economy and will no doubt be flip-flopped on in a few months time.
bjcy
It’s important to note that many of the expat accounts have been closed down due to the laxity of individual bank branches in enforcing their own policies, which were taken advantage of by nefarious actors. Many expats attempt to open bank accounts on tourist visas (which include the recently popular Destination Thailand Visa for digital nomads) without proper identification, and though allowed in the past, is now being restricted. One can argue about the classification of visas and the dissonance between economic goals and immigration policy, but for Thais, this is a long overdue enforcement action especially as it regards to scams targeting an older generation. Yes, it significantly impacts honest expats looking to stay beyond the short-term, but there is a way to doing things in Thailand that requires guests to adapt to their hosts, of which accepting the reality of Thailand’s political situations is an important part.
JumpCrisscross
> will no doubt be flip-flopped on in a few months time
As emergency measures usually are.
null
alephnerd
[flagged]
cobertos
Can you elaborate on the kind of expats that are undesirable? I don't know what specific types of people you might be referring to
alephnerd
1. The kind that is looking at visiting Thailand as a cheap way to booze, party, smoke weed, and do other stuff. They do not spend enough money to move the needle economically in a country where the majority of the economy is connected to automotive and electronics manufacturing
2. The kind that try to reside in Thailand long term but don't want to file for immigration, so using various loopholes like the "Visa dash" or paying for Thai language classes with no attendance or requirements to attend the class. Lots of drop shippers are doing this and are dodging incorporation taxes in Thailand
3. The kind that come to only train Muay Thai or BJJ, but don't contribute to the rest of the economy (I'm guilty of this). Living and training exclusive at a Fairtex or a Sityodong isn't percolating capital in the rest of Thailand.
All 3 of these types of expats and tourists are barely spending $500/mo in Thailand after rent or hotel spend, and simply don't contribute to the Thai economy to the same degree the other sectors of the economy are. The only reason those 3 types of tourists are tolerated is because the businesses they patronize are overwhelmingly owned by local politicians and give them pocket change, but aren't actually useful from an economic perspective, because it has depressed wages, and exacerbated organized crime.
Heritage and upscale tourism is a separate story, because the premiums that can be demanded and the wages and skills needed incentivize upskilling as well as building a white money local ecosystem.
baobabKoodaa
> good
???
hnlmorg
I opened that link expecting to be outraged but instead finding myself sympathetic to their solution.
High value transfers should be subject to additional scrutiny to confirm it’s legitimate.
The hard part is making sure you balance that well enough so that you’re protecting against malaise without the bank then becoming a consumer problem themselves.
It will be interesting to see how well this works.
segmondy
High value transfer is relative to the person making it. For some people, moving $1k-$5k daily is as normal as it is for a college kid moving $10-$50 daily. Then for some people $10k-$50k is the norm.
weird-eye-issue
They froze tons of accounts without warning, it was not just a matter of setting daily limits
hnlmorg
It does say those were tied to “mules”, so freezing those accounts is the right course of action.
In fact the last thing you want to do is give criminals warning that you’re going to freeze their accounts. I’d imagine that would be extremely counterproductive for everyone bar those criminals.
ryandrake
Believed to be tied to "mules" unless their classification method has zero false positives. If it does have false positives then those non-mules have a right to complain.
kijin
The article is unclear about when the freezings took place, but the sentence starting with "By July" seems to suggest that 3 million is the cumulative total of all the accounts that were frozen from January to July. So it probably wasn't a sudden mass freezing, just constant whack-a-mole.
seunosewa
I feel that 3 million is a lot even over a six month period. Over 16,000 accounts per day.
refulgentis
If I understand correctly*, they froze 3 million accounts tied to 177K mules.
Couldn't find anything that indicated there was a mass freezing of legitimate accounts, or a singular complaint of an incident of that happening.
* Can't copy paste...is the article an image!?
ameliaquining
Article's not an image, it's regular HTML text content. The site just uses some extremely obnoxious JavaScript that blocks text selection, right-clicking, and the view-source and developer tools keyboard shortcuts. The latter is especially pointless since anyone who knows about those features also knows that they can be accessed via the browser menu, which JavaScript can't block.
debugnik
> is the article an image!?
I can't check right now, but I'm guessing they set `user-select: none` in CSS.
Stevvo
New customers will be defined as "high-risk" with, a separate classification from "vulnerable" which is for under 15s and over 65s. The limit for these "high-risk" customers is 50000 baht a day, which is surely going to be inconvenient to deal with if you ever need it, e.g. for medical bills.
nxobject
Medical bills are usually a lot more reasonable than that in Thailand - we have a competitive healthcare market that’s backstopped by a public hospitals and a public universal healthcare system.
StopDisinfo910
That’s two months of the country median income. I’m pretty sure medical providers will be okay.
That’s mostly annoying for inter accounts movement if you move money around a bit but I think you would get higher capacity if you are concerned.
ameliaquining
Medical providers are probably okay with getting paid in 50,000-baht daily installments if necessary?
Ekaros
1 344,17 Euro
Which to me seems entirely reasonable limit. Such transactions are relatively rare.
hnlmorg
The article also said that you can apply to make larger transfers and the process gets approved within a few hours (so basically “same day”.
That means unusual payments like home purchases can be approved. But fraud is significantly harder…at least in theory.
rr808
I wonder in the crypto based future if there will be any safeguards to avoid scams and fraud. Instant settlement is not a good thing for me, Ideally any transaction over $1000 should take a week and can be cancelled. Transactions over $100k I'd like to go to a physical location and prove my identity.
edent
The original Bitcoin paper says:
> Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.
Emphasis added.
It is conceptually possible to create a crypto "credit card". But given that existing transactions are already slow, expensive, and complicated to integrate - I can't see it being attractive.
There's also the issue of trust. Escrow merchants need to be highly-trusted by both sides. They also need regulation and insurance. Those things are all in short-supply in cryptoland.
ronsor
In many cryptocurrencies, you can cancel a transaction before the first confirmation by paying a (relatively) small fee. Your other points defeat the purpose of most crypto, though.
olalonde
With layer 2, probably centralized, payment networks. Layer 1 is too "low level" for most transactions.
justajot
These are exactly the types of things Chia is working on, and at least to some degree, are in production.
FabHK
Of course, if the sender can cancel transactions at their discretion, that enables another class of frauds. The solution has to lie in some trusted centralized party outside the payment system [0]. Chia can't solve this. A banking system and legal system can.
[0] Goharshady, A. K. (2021). Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain (arXiv:2110.09857). http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857
Filligree
It’s amazing watching the crypto folks slowly reinvent the entire banking industry.
Also kinda pointless though.
tenuousemphasis
Vaults are a proposed Bitcoin construct that allow you to have similar features. In order to work, it requires some breaking changes which may or may not ever happen.
walterbell
September 14th, https://www.thailandnews.co/2025/09/bank-of-thailand-seeks-f...
> Bank of Thailand (BOT) will meet with commercial banks and the Anti-Online Scam Operations Centre (AOC) on Monday to address growing complaints about the wrongful freezing of bank accounts.. after small retailers and individuals reported being abruptly cut off from their funds without warning or recourse.. Assistant BOT Governor.. acknowledged that current procedures for identifying and freezing suspected “mule accounts” need refinement to prevent harming innocent customers. Many account holders have taken to social media to express frustration over being unable to access their money or conduct business after transfers from unknown sources triggered automated freezes.
petermcneeley
New technocratic control repackage just dropped: "scam losses"
ghostly_s
3 million accounts (the original text), not "3M"[1] accounts.
PaywallBuster
> By July, 3 million accounts have been closed
this wasn't a swift action overnight
they could be blocking this many accounts on a yearly basis just from scam reports at the police station
or more which seems to be the case recently, but not overnight
this is bad article
hyghjiyhu
Maybe I'm too suspicious but Thailandb is not a democratic country, was recently in an armed conflict. Could there be something more to this?
andrewmcwatters
For reference, banks in the United States flag all transactions above $10,000, and repeat transactions that appear to be skirting this threshold.
tenpies
Also worth thinking about inflation with this one.
The $10,000 figure originated with the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act[1]. Back then, that was a lot of money.
If it had kept up with plain old vanilla government-reported inflation, the number would be closer to $83,000 today[2].
---
[1] https://www.fincen.gov/resources/statutes-and-regulations/ba...
[2] https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1...
latchkey
What's the real reason? Fraud has been around forever now. How is it that people were able to create so many mule accounts in the first place? What sort of KYC was going on? Why start limiting bank accounts without warning?
So many questions...
Update: my Thai friend just wrote me this:
"Not in trouble, it's the Chinese and Russians money laundering. Every Russian has had their accounts suspended, this was about half a year ago, now they are slowly doing the Chinese and Brits too. Vietnam is not much better, also suspending all foreigners accounts until you can prove you have a trc here."
Update2: just saw this on IG… https://www.instagram.com/p/DOZM0ZOkUAy/
walterbell
May 2025, "Vietnam to close 86M bank accounts for lack of biometric data", 20 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45201549
nxobject
Thailand’s a very good place to get money out of you’re foreign organized crime in general - the fig leaf of “I’m buying an usually expensive condo/villa/yacht” is a good excuse.
sirn
> How is it that people were able to create so many mule accounts in the first place? What sort of KYC was going on?
They pay a low-income/no-income person a small fee (possibly monthly) to let them borrow their account. Sadly, people who would fall into this are not hard to find in Thailand.
> What sort of KYC was going on?
There are accounts that are grandfathered in and don’t require KYC but have been able to access online banking, etc. Mine is such, and my bank (BAY) is discontinuing that particular loophole at the end of this month. (I'm in Thailand right now to do this KYC, despite having not come back here for the last 6 years.)
kijin
We've been having a similar fraud issue here in South Korea as well. These criminals call vulnerable people, impersonate bankers or government officials, and social-engineer them into trasferring money. Some even pretend to have kidnapped your child, play AI-generated voice of a sobbing kid, and demand ransom.
Fraud has always been around, but I think a few recent developments have exacerbated the problem. KYC has been relaxed a lot since Covid, so you can open a whole bunch of accounts with just an image of an ID card. Lots of elderly people now have access to mobile banking, so they don't have to visit a physical branch where a clerk can flag suspicious transfer requests.
Bank accounts in South Korea now start with a daily transfer limit of 1 million won (about $700), even lower than the 50k bhat limit that the Thai government has instituted.
walterbell
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/sep/08/m...
KK Park – a vast, heavily guarded complex stretching for 210 hectares (520 acres) along the churning Moei River that forms Myanmar’s border with Thailand.. with its on-site hospital, restaurants, bank and neat lines of villas with manicured lawns, looks more like the campus of a Silicon Valley tech company than what it really is: the frontline of a multibillion-dollar criminal fraud industry fuelled by human trafficking and brutal violence.. Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have in recent years become havens for transnational crime syndicates running scam centres such as KK Park, which use enslaved workers to run complex online fraud and scamming schemes that generate huge profits.latchkey
This!
China's Silk Road ends in Sihanoukville Cambodia. If you've ever been there, you've seen the eco-devastation and utter disregard for human life along the entire road.
null
They’re trying to reduce non-technical people or elder scams and fraud.
A scam network takes over phones, tricks people on friends lists to follow directions so their phone can be remotely controlled (Apple and Android). Then the cycle repeats and they try to drain bank accounts in the process.
Thailand is placing 50k maximums for digital transfers then adjusting over time based on … 50k baht = $1,575 USD