Now this is a story that I am going to be a bit on the fence about because I know from personal experience that there are a lot of condo owners and house owners in this country that view foreigners as someone that is never going to receive their deposit back no matter what they do. I don't want to paint anyone with the same brush or anything like that but this is an evil world that we live in, and there are some people out there that will "take you to the cleaners" if they know that you have no legal recourse against them.
In Thailand, if a foreigner takes a Thai person to court you are at a huge disadvantage because even though this is contrary to "law" the Thai judicial system favors their own people, even if they are wrong. This is something that is kind of understood in the expat community and rather than try to fight a battle that we almost certainly are going to lose, there is an online community of people that points out who the bad actors are in the rental game who steal from all of their tenants. This seems to have some effect if you know where to look. Sadly, it is on Facebook but I suppose if I am going to be forced to use that damn thing, it may as well be for something that is useful.
This story comes from Phuket, which is a hotbed for ripoffs in this country anyway, so I am not going to jump to conclusions about who is in the wrong here but I do feel that if you are wronged by a land/property owner, the stupidest thing you can possibly do is completely trash the condo that you are renting with your your real passport information. They can and will find you and you can be guaranteed that you are going to end up needing to pay more than the actual damages to the condo.
According to the owner, who of course posted it to social media before she gave it to the authorities, the tenants were staying for a certain amount of time and then decided to not renew the lease. The owner, who is putting on perhaps a facade of being an innocent victim here states that she contacted the tenants to get their bank details to give back the deposit but the woman who was staying there tried to give her bank details instead of the man who was actually on the lease. Now if this is true, the owner did the correct thing but this also could be a case of her making a convenient excuse when she had no intention of ever returning the deposit, which is always a possibility.
I have to say that I am kind of surprised at how the police are handling this because rather than immediately go and arrest the woman who is apparently responsible, they took note of the fact that the words on the wall represent the same amount as the deposit and therefore this is being viewed as perhaps, the landowner actually yes, being a swindler.
Something you need to understand about Phuket and other places like it is that many times in the past the area has gotten seriously bad press about ripoffs taking place and when this makes international news, it has a really horrible impact on overall tourism. Since Thailand depends so heavily on tourism money, especially in a place like Phuket that almost entirely does, these cases need to be handled very carefully lest a movement begins online to boycott the country or Phuket entirely.
This was something that was really widespread a few years back with the beach deck chair rental scam where they would harass the hell out of anyone that didn't pay money for a chair, and earlier than that there was a massive scam involving fake damages to jetski rentals.
Don't take that short to heart too much. I only put it here because it is funny that they would say that this was Vincent's "dream ride" and how he was left stranded in "shark infested waters." There are virtually no sharks in Thailand and certainly not the kind that are going to attack you.
Back to the property story though: I'm not sure I believe the land owner in this one about her story of being an innocent victim here. Phuket is well known for being scam-central as far as Thailand is concerned so it is very much possible that she only made this public because her plan backfired on her. That being said, nobody really know what happened here.
Trashing a room probably isn't the best idea, but then again, the police likely weren't going to do anything about it if it hadn't gone public / viral and it is ironic that the reason why it has gone public is because the owner herself put it on social media.
If they do get to the bottom of this I can guarantee you that it wont be in the news because Phuket is really interested in preserving a sometimes false sense of fairness.
Be on your guard if an when you go there. While it has tamed down a bit post-Covid, there are still a lot of scams there. I'm not saying that this story was definitely a scam, but I do know that this does happen quite a lot there.
