Digital Economy Ministry Ramps Up Online Crime Crackdown, Audits Mule Accounts and Nominee Companies, Spreads Warnings to 77,000 Villages
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The Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, or DE, is preparing to step up its crackdown on online crime by auditing mule accounts and nominee companies that support fraud networks. Ms. Nann Boonthida Somchai, Deputy Minister of the DE Ministry, disclosed after chairing the 4th/2569 meeting of the Committee on Prevention and Suppression of Technology Crime, together with the 2nd/2569 meeting of the Subcommittee on Prevention of Technology Crime and Transnational Crime, that the meeting followed up on the progress of measures by relevant agencies, with representatives from the DE Ministry, the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Thailand, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Anti-Money Laundering Office, the Royal Thai Police, the Thai Bankers' Association, the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, and the Electronic Transactions Development Agency taking part. The Deputy Minister of the DE Ministry said that school and university students are increasingly likely to fall victim to online scammers, through schemes involving scholarships, dormitory rentals, and other tactics. The DE Ministry therefore plans to coordinate with the Department of Provincial Administration to use district-level meetings and monthly meetings of subdistrict heads and village heads to spread warning information from the Cyber Police to more than 77,000 villages nationwide. It will also coordinate with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation to disseminate information about online threats to educational institutions across the country. The meeting also followed up on guidelines for collecting geolocation data in financial transactions and on driving forward the operations center for the prevention and suppression of technology crime under Section 8/6, and discussed the framework of the National Anti-Fraud Master Plan and the criteria for announcing and revoking the names of individuals on mule account lists under Section 8/5 (6). It also placed importance on the use of nominee companies as a tool to support online criminal networks, after many cases were found in which juristic persons were involved in transactions, the movement of money, and the concealment of those behind fraud operations. The DE Ministry therefore plans to coordinate with the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Interior, the Revenue Department, the Ministry of Finance, and related agencies to integrate data, examine juristic persons, shareholding structures, and transactions, and track the connections of companies with suspicious behavior in order to take legal action. The goal is to cut off the cycle and the structures behind it, so that nominee companies are not used to support scam operations and online crime in Thailand.