Thailand Taps Data Sharing Law to Fight Scammers
Thailand's new data-sharing decree between government agencies helped slash scam losses by 75% in four months, enabling faster tracking of fraudsters' financial movements across previously siloed databases.
Call center gangs and cross-border scammers have quietly drained Thai wallets for years, pushing total fraud losses to a national crisis level. But mid-2025 brought encouraging news when Thailand's Ministry of Digital Economy for Society revealed that scam damages fell significantly over four months, with a little-known law proving to be the breakthrough weapon: the "2025 Decree on Disclosure of Personal Information Held by State Agencies to Other State Agencies."
The decree took effect on June 30, 2025, after royal gazette publication on June 29. Its core purpose is to require state agencies to share personal data they hold with other state agencies upon request, enabling faster electronic cross-linking of information to serve the public. Previously, citizen data scattered across police, tax authorities, customs, and business development agencies sat trapped in separate "silos," forcing investigators to navigate slow bureaucratic channels to trace suspects' financial movements. The new law unlocked rapid data-sharing between agencies.
Digital Economy Minister Chaiyachanok Chidchob announced that his ministry has already integrated data with five major agencies: the National Police Office, the Special Cases Investigation Department (DSI), the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), the Bank of Thailand, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Acting under anti-cybercrime powers, these agencies now access bank account data linked to scammer networks.
Results are striking: scam losses in June 2025 dropped to around 530 million baht, down from 2.111 billion baht in March 2025—a 1.581 billion baht decline, or roughly 75%, in just four months. When the decree reaches full implementation, the minister said, it will enable even broader data-linking across government, giving authorities a complete money-trail picture and faster victim restitution.
Most scam bases operate outside Thailand, scattered along borders with Myanmar and in special economic zones in Laos, backed by gray-market Chinese funding networks. National Police data show that since launching an online complaint system in March 2021 through September 2024, over one million online fraud cases have been reported, with cumulative losses exceeding 100 billion baht. Early 2025 saw major crackdowns in gray zones along the border, forcing call centers to repeatedly relocate—a "whack-a-mole" pattern rather than root-cause fixes, even as the private sector grapples with fallout.
