John Stapleton - THAILAND: DEADLY DESTINATION

The daily robbing, bashing, drugging, extortion and murder of foreign tourists on Thai soil, along with numerous scandals involving unsafe facilities and well established scams, has led to frequent predictions that Thailands multi-billion dollar tourist industry will self-destruct. Instead tourist numbers more than doubled in the decade to 2014. Both the Thai Tourism Authority and the Thai Ministry of Tourism forecast an astonishing 30 million tourist arrivals per annum in 2015 and beyond. The world might not have come to the hometowns of the many visitors fascinated by Thailand, but it certainly came to the Land of Smiles.

While the Thai media is heavily censored, and bad news stories about tourists suppressed, nonetheless there is more than enough evidence to demonstrate that something has gone seriously awry with the nations tourist industry.

In 2014, just as in the years preceding it, there were train, bus, ferry, speedboat, motorbike and car accidents, murders, knifings, unexplained deaths, numerous suicides, diving accidents, robberies gone wrong, anonymous bodies washing up on the shores and a string of alcohol and drug related incidents.

Thailands carefully manufactured reputation for hospitality, as a land of palm trees and sun-drenched beaches, happy-hour bars, world class hotels and welcoming people, as paradise on Earth, is very different to the reality many tourists encounter. The rapid growth in Thai tourism has been a triumph of advertising and image creation; building the perception, firmly entrenched in the West, that Thais embrace strangers. In reality, the relations between ethnic Thais and foreigners are often difficult; and there has been growing friction and disengagement, a drift from curiosity to contempt, as visitor numbers have increased.

Tourists choose one destination over another for a number of reasons, most of which Thailand scores highly on: cultural uniqueness, climate, natural resources and environment, value for money,

And on the core issue of safety, Thailand scores very badly indeed.

While many foreigners leave the country happy, there are equally thousands of travellers from Europe, America, Australia, India and the Middle East, both short-time tourists and long-term residents, leaving the country impoverished, distressed, frightened and unlikely to ever return.

If, with the murder or accidental deaths of tourists a common event, they leave at all.

There is no doubt that Thailand, with its porous borders, massive influx of foreigners, well established local and foreign mafias, corrupt police forces and easily bribed officials, has become the 21 st Centurys crime capital of Asia.

The nations strategic location, lax law enforcement and modern transport systems have assisted its role as safe haven to a number of international crime networks. Rackets include forged and stolen passports, drugs, wildlife and arms smuggling and people trafficking. Criminal milieus from around the world find The Land of Smiles a very congenial atmosphere in which to operate. Since the 1970s, when the influx of tourists first began, German, British, Irish, Russian, West African, and Filipino crime gangs have all proliferated in the Kingdom, as have Japanese Yakuza, Chinese Triads, South Korean and Taiwanese brotherhoods. The local police are also involved in everything from paedophile rings to drug smuggling. In Bangkok for example the police and the mafia work hand in hand to provide under-age victims to foreign sex tourists. Thailand is a signatory to the UNs Convention on the Rights of the Child. It does not comply.

A 2014 study by the Thailand Institute of Justice showed that more than 20 major transnational gangs were plaguing the country, including Russian and Romanian credit card skimming gangs.

A spokesman for the Institute Natee Jitsawang said their research showed foreign criminal gangs continued to develop and adapt their crime techniques while law-enforcement personnel were reshuffled regularly. As a result authorities could not keep pace with criminal operators using the country as a base.

Russian gangs had particular expertise in ATM and credit card forging, skimming and selling overseas bank customers' information. The gangs used modern technology that could skim the card information in 30 seconds and download it onto a computer so the card could be forged.

Fake cards were then used to withdraw cash from ATM machines at night to avoid police detection. Even when they were caught, they managed to destroy evidence quickly. The study found that a Romanian gang was also skilled in card skimming and had extensive operations in Thailand.

Natee said the gang imported an electronic card forgery machine from Spain to southern Thailand via post and then produced fake cards to buy goods at shopping malls and jewellery shops or withdraw cash. He said the gang installed card skimming devices onto ATM machines at various tourist attractions, especially Bangkok's Sukhumvit area.

German gangs stole personal bank details via the Internet by releasing viruses to hack information about bank account logins and passwords while the target accessed their online accounts. The stolen money was then wired to a bank account overseas. French and English gangs used cards containing stolen information from bank customers in France and Scandinavia to withdraw cash via ATM machines in Thailand, especially Phuket. These gangs installed small cameras or mobile card skimmer devices to steal information.

According to the Institute, there are four Latin American gangs - Colombians, Mexicans, Guatemalans and Peruvians - that commit crimes in Thailand, mostly thefts and robberies. The Colombians

Western criminals love Thailand as a kind of tropical hideout full of cheap booze and accommodating women, well away from the cold climates and police surveillance of their own countries.

Asian expert Thomas Schmid writes that the foreign mafia operating in Thailand are not necessarily just branches of international organisations. The insalubrious band together in their adopted country to form their own syndicates: This development has caused Thailands foreign mafia scene to become extraordinarily complex. The authorities are unable (or perhaps unwilling)

The arrival of other nations mafias, in particular the Russian mafia, which has come to control a substantial slice of Thailands entertainment industry, adds a new level of ruthlessness to the nations already treacherous sex industry. And it is exactly in the nightly confluence of Russian, Thai and other criminal elements, operating arm in arm with the local authorities, in which many tourists, out for a good time in the bars and clubs, come dangerously unstuck. Within metres of their hotels and apartments foreigners enter a zone where their money, rather than protecting them, puts them at immediate risk.

This superficially alluring, adventure filled netherworld of go-go bars, massage parlours, nightclubs and brothels represents a kind of symbolic space between the respectable and the dissolute, the legal and illegal, a fantasy escape from the conformist, over-regulated societies of the West. They lure the bold and the curious alike. Straight into some of the most dangerous tourist traps on Earth.

Traditionally the Thailand Tourist Authority and the Tourist Organisation of Thailand have touted ever increasing tourist numbers as the sole barometer of the industrys success. But the seemingly endless catalogue of dead and injured foreigners and the portrayal of Thailand as Scam Land, along with all the daily mayhem of the tourist trade resulting from uncontrolled development and poor planning, have begun to impact badly on the nations image. The ever changing caste of the wanted and the wanting within the expatriate community adds to the sense of a party which has run out of control.