Thai prime minister says she was nearly tricked by scam caller posing as another world leader

Scam calls can target anyone, even the prime minister of Thailand.

Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said this week that she had received a scam call from someone impersonating another world leader, whom she did not identify.

“I could hear clearly from the voice that it was the voice of the country leader,” she said Wednesday, adding that the caller may have used AI to fake the other leader’s voice.

It began with a voice message from the person asking how Paetongtarn was doing and saying they were looking forward to working together. She texted back that she was OK and the other person said they would get in touch.

The person later tried to call, “but fortunately it was 11 p.m. and I fell asleep and did not pick up the call,” said Paetongtarn, 38, who became the country’s youngest prime minister in August and is the daughter of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

She saw the missed call in the morning and texted back to arrange a call. Then she got another voice message asking for a donation, saying Thailand was the only member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, that had not donated.

When she received another text instructing her to transfer money to a foreign bank account, “I knew this was not real,” Paetongtarn said.

She did not say when she received the messages.

Southeast Asia has become a hub for telecom and other online fraud, especially in the border towns connecting Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, the latter of which is mired in a civil war. Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked into online criminal operations across the region, according to the United Nations.

Most of the people being trafficked are from Southeast Asia as well as South Asia, mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, though some come from as far away as Africa and Latin America.

They are then forced to engage in what are known as “pig-butchering scams,” using psychological manipulation and other techniques to lure others into online investment or fake romantic relationships in an effort to defraud them of money, in some cases their life savings. The scam centers target people all over the world, including the United States.

Americans are estimated to have lost $3.5 billion to the Southeast Asian scamming industry in 2023, according to the United States Institute of Peace, a nonprofit group in Washington.

Earlier this month, a Chinese actor was found and returned to Thailand after going missing near the Thai-Myanmar border in a possible human trafficking case. According to Thai police, the actor, Wang Xing, 22, believed he was going to a casting call in Thailand but ended up being trained to scam other Chinese people.

The case was widely shared on social media in China, where authorities have been calling for a crackdown on the scam operations.

Speaking at the ASEAN digital ministers meeting in Bangkok on Thursday, Paetongtarn said online scams were a serious threat to the public and that combating them required regional cooperation.

She has said authorities must address the situation so that it doesn’t affect tourism, an industry Thailand relies on heavily. China is one of the biggest sources of visitors to the country.

China said Friday that Chinese and Thai police had jointly arrested 12 domestic and foreign criminal suspects in connection with scam operations that resulted in Chinese nationals going missing.