You dont need a VPN anymore to access neteller from Thailand. With a Thai addres on the neteller account, you are perfectly fine in makingdeposits and cashouts to various sites, however funding your neteller account is problematic, as you cant transfer from Thai bank accounts.

Stars dont seem to care much about adress. I had my Danish address for 4 years while living here.

Dont know anything about simcard and wifi...

a lot of the time the establishment pockets 100% of the service charge here (imagine, average salary somewhere around 8k baht, you get a massage at oasis spa for 2,500 baht/hr, think the masseuse is getting 250b/hr for the massage? no chance.)

if you feel like tipping, give it directly to the person who serviced you, a lot of restaurants also take the tips given on the change plates or put in the bowls, but the waiter can pocket change if given directly to them.

He did have a lawyer, it was the lawyer who set up the 'deal'. The lawyer then made out something got lost in translation. The same lawyer manged to fight the case for him and with further bribes got the final verdict down to a suspended sentence and community service. which is still no fun. and one wrong move he got 2 years to do in full.

He was not set up on the charge he was 100% guilty.

grow one...

i would of done the prison time, expensive!

It is not only the prison time you need to worry about, even though he didn't wanna do 3-5years, if you serve time you are black listed, which would be even more of a problem for him as he owns several properties here. To that end 1.3mil baht to him is a lot less than 1.3mil to you.

Plus he could make that money back ten fold being out rather than rotting in jail for 3-5.

Is it really that hard to cross the border? It's just a river crossing away into Laos and there are big roads on both sides of the border. I didn't get the impression that it's monitored at all.

Of course anyone who is savvy enough to buy weed from random tuktuk drivers in KSR in Thailand is probably not up for this.

I give him 6 months in jail unless parents help him out and pay a ton more money than 20K as the payoffs get complicated.

lol all around! i read that as 400k not 40k. 4 people didn't have $1300 between them? only thing for him to do now is do his time in thai prison.

well for one i dont have 1.4mill.

Alot of backpackers will buy there return ticket and only come to places like Asia for a month or even longer so with under a £1000 sometimes. Traveling on a shoe string i believe the term they coined up

can a guy with only $1k to his name afford a good lawyer?

It is ok to cross any boarder where you are not seen, but the problem is getting visa sorted in new country, obv you gonna wanna leave via an airport at some point.

Besides the point. I only used that example to show how much information Thai immigration have access to in their computers. Also he was on a serious weapon charge not a bag of weed.

fk these are the situations we all dread to be in.

So he's got to either get money for a lawyer and pray that the corrupt police can be bribed or flee the country like u guys are talking about.

I think as it's just some weed i'd pay the lawyler and trust that it could get sorted. If it was more serious i would somehow get accross the border and head for the consulate or somehow pay for a new passport. Whatever he decides he needs a lot more cash than he has or he's in the monkey house

If you get a new passport in Thailand you need to go to immigration with a bunch of paperwork to get your previous visa transferred to the new passport. You won't be allowed to leave to country if you don't do this. You don't just get a mulligan because you lost your passport. This is true of most countries.

Hello! this is my first post in here, ty to everyone contributing to this great thread

I will be travelling across se asia for the next few months and have a couple of questions if youd be so kind

1. Ill be entering thailand from malaysia and heading to phuket first. Would you recommend to go straight to phuket (fly?) or stop off along the way?

2. Do you know a website to browse/book a villa for 6 people on koh phangan for nye?


Ty very much

Yup that's the situation i was in. I had a new passport but according to the Thai immigration was not in the country.

without knowing anything about Koh Phangan, I'm sure the good places are all booked up for NYE already.

on ko phangan i think u will find nothing, maybe on ko samui but it also can be difficult now.

so lets say you swam across the river into laos, went to the embassy got a new passport but didnt have visa

what would happen at the airport when you tried to leave?


what if you showed up at the embassy telling them some crazy story about being drugged and waking up in laos with nothing at all, would they help you to get back home? or just try and help you get back to thailand?

get him to the Ecuador embassy ldo

Not sure about loas but i know someone who fled Thailand and smuggled into Maylasia. Went to uk embassy to get new passport, when he returned to pick it up they basically told him that they knew what he had done and that it was up to the Malaysian immigration as to weather they would grant him a visa. The uk embassy didn't care he had fled Thailand on bail.

He told the Malaysian immigration that he was on a bus coming from Thailand that took a route into malaysia that didn't have a boarder check (apparently at that time, about 6 years ago it did use to happen for real). They held his passport for 3 weeks and he had to go down once per week, to see if they would grant him an entry visa, he stuck to that story and each time met with a superior officer.

On the Friday of the last week, he begged the officer with tears in his eyes to grant him a visa and luckily the guy did. Not sure what would of happend if they would of denied him the visa.

What they did not like was the fact he 'lost' his passport before going to immigration, those people who genuinely got into Malaysia via that route at least had entry stamps and t.m card for Thailand.

If you have to flee Thailand use maylais or Cambodia, loas is going the wrong way.

I can tell you exactly what would happen. I lost my passport in Laos, went the American embassy with money and passport photos and walked out with an emergency passport in under an hour. They give me some documentation and tell me I need to go to immigration, get a paper from them, then go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where I'll get an exit visa that will allow me to exit the country. I go to immigration and have the following conversation.

"Hi, I just got a replacement passport and they said I need a document from you to get my exit visa."
"You are very handsome."
"Thank you Colonel."
"What was the number of your entry visa?"
"Umm, I'm not really sure."
"Travel documents are important and you need to be careful with them and keep track of the information."
"Sorry about that, I'll make sure to do that in the future."
"What date did you enter the country?"
"I don't know the exact date, it was about three weeks ago."
"You don't know the exact date?"
"No."
"We need to have someone at the border manually go through the database until they find you. This could take several days."
"It would be a lot more convenient for me if there was a way to get this done today."
"This stuff is srs biz. We can't give you the paper until we've found your visa in the system."
"Is there any way I can 'fill out a form' to get this processed faster."
"I wish there was, but we consider this srs biz. We'll hold onto your passport for now. Come back tomorrow and we'll let you know if we found your information."

So you would be screwed because the Lao government takes passport fraud seriously. For enough money you could probably bribe them, but it would likely be more than it would take to get off in Thailand. Committing serious international crimes to avoid getting charged with marijuana possession is ******ED. It's doubly ******ed because he can make it go away for a moderate amount of money.

Kid needs to bite the bullet and tell his parents or someone else with money and common sense who is willing to help.

The kid either needs to make up a story for his parents about how he got robbed or something and needs a bunch of money or say something like "There were four of us sharing a taxi and we got searched. One kid I don't really know had weed with him and the cops said we were all going to get charged if we didn't pay them. The other three were able to get the money but I didn't have enough and now I'm going to get charged." If the parents decide to be hardasses, talking to a Thai cop should scare the **** out of them.

From the OP: "but he is adamant that he's not getting a solicitor and he'll worry about it when the time comes..."

The kid is not very smart and I am guessing the cop did not let him go with his friends for the B20k because he shot off his mouth.

The chances of getting away from this by trying to flee the country without a passport are slim to none.

If he has any chance to avoid spending time at the "Bangkok Hilton", he is going to need to find the right lawyer and raise the cash needed for appropriate and maybe considerable pay offs.