Chinese woman launders money for fraud gang! Cash flow reaches 600 million in 2 months!

On March 19th, officials from the Cyber Crime Investigation Division of the Thailand Cyber Police held a press conference to disclose details about a major online investment fraud case that was recently cracked.

The case originated on April 2, 2024, when a Thai female teacher was approached by a Facebook user with an attractive profile picture. After a heated chat, they moved their conversation to LINE. Subsequently, the user invited the teacher to invest in a Singaporean fund through an app starting with "M". Initially, she was able to withdraw the money she invested, but later on, she could no longer retrieve her funds. Within just 16 days, the teacher invested seven times, totaling 1,500,000 Thai Baht, and was only able to recover funds twice, resulting in a total loss of 1,442,100 Thai Baht.

Consequently, the woman reported the case to the police, who through their investigation discovered that the criminal gang's financial transactions were linked to four Thai individuals, all of whom held illegal accounts used to receive the fraudulent funds. Additionally, the gang had set up cryptocurrency accounts and converted the stolen money into USDT through P2P purchases on the BINANCE platform, eventually transferring it to a digital wallet under a service provider in Cambodia.

Further investigation revealed that the owner of the aforementioned digital wallet was a 27-year-old Chinese woman named Di Wu, with transaction records amounting to 18.4 million USDT, approximately 618 million Thai Baht. Her personal digital wallet account also showed monthly transactions ranging from 600,000 to 1.3 million Thai Baht. Preliminary findings indicated that her digital wallet was linked to as many as 63 cases, mostly involving "pig-butchering" romance investment scams.

As a result, the police gathered evidence and successfully applied for an arrest warrant for the Chinese woman. They further discovered that she frequently traveled from Thailand to Cambodia, Laos (Golden Triangle), and Malaysia, and was currently residing in a luxurious pool villa in Pattaya, Chonburi Province, where she was arrested. Subsequent to her arrest, the police found her passport used for registering the cryptocurrency wallet accounts, and her phone contained numerous photos of her lavish lifestyle and drug use in Cambodia. The three countries she frequently visited were Thailand, Malaysia, and China.

Despite this, the woman denied the charges, claiming that her personal documents might have been used by her ex-boyfriend to set up the cryptocurrency accounts, and her frequent trips to neighboring countries were for selling concert tickets online. However, the police did not believe her testimony and are currently intensifying their efforts to gather more evidence and expand the investigation to identify more individuals involved in the case.