Do Bangkok Bank Managers Target
Foreigners?
Opening a Bangkok Bank account seemed like the logical thing to do around 12 years ago when I first decided that visiting Thailand on a regular basis is what I wanted to do.
In those days, for foreigners opening any bank account in Thailand was simply a matter of filling in the necessary forms at the Bangkok Bank of your choice, submitting 
a copy of your passport along with a small deposit and you were issued with a bank passbook.
For me, having been only recently introduced to the wonders of Thailand, I thought that the Nana Plaza was the most wonderful place on the planet and could see no reason to venture any further from it than my legs would carry me in any more than a 5 minute stroll. So I set up a Bangkok bank account at the soi 3 branch of the Bangkok Bank which is around 200 meters from Nana Plaza situated at the beginning of soi 4 Sukhumvit.
Pattaya has Bangkok Bank
Branches too.
However it wasn’t long before I discovered that places like Pattaya and Phuket also had similar wonders available and quite often were a lot easier on the pocket and also had branches of all the major Thai banks including the Bangkok Bank.
A few months later having moved my main base to Pattaya after being mugged on one occasion, and drugged on another around the Nana region of Bangkok, I decided to transfer my bank account to the Pattaya branch of the Bangkok Bank but because Pattaya is in a different province, I was informed by bank staff that the option to electronically transfer wasn’t available and that I needed to open another separate account in Pattaya.
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Once again, no problems in doing that, but for the same reason quoted above, I was again told by staff that carrying out a direct branch to branch funds
transfer also wasn’t an available option.
At the time, I thought it all a bit strange being accustomed to carrying out simple transactions like this at home with no problems, but having been getting used to the idea of TITÂ accepted it all with no more than a little annoyance.
At the time, I had close to a million baht deposited in the Soi 3 Nana branch of the Bangkok Bank which I wanted to deposit into my Pattaya account and since the staff in Bangkok had refused previously to do it electronically, and with my mild annoyance slowly rising to mild anger, I caught a bus once again to Bangkok where I confronted the staff and demanded my money in cash.
Now my forever wise girlfriend of the time couldn’t bear the thought of me being mugged yet again with all that cash on me, particularly with the knowledge that she would be getting at least some of it (if I wasn’t mugged) she in her wisdom, after a quick and hushed conversation with the bank teller, convinced me to take a cashier’s check which I could then deposit directly into my new Bangkok bank account in Pattaya.
Well, that made perfect sense and so as soon as the Pattaya branch of the Bangkok Bank’s doors opened the following morning, I was standing at the back of the inevitable queue that generally snakes around the inside of most Thai banks regardless of the time of day, while armed with my 12 hour old check for around a million Baht and my 4 day old Bangkok Bank Pattaya branch passbook, which I eventually was able to pass to the teller who upon examining them both along with the deposit slip, promptly disappeared into a closed office set outside the parameters of the queues and toward the back of the bank.
On her return a few minutes later, she told me that I would need to pay a transaction fee of around 9000 baht in order to finalize the deposit.
When my query of why returned the same answer I’d received previously relating to being different provinces, the mild anger I’d experienced the day before escalated into a seething volcanic rush scarcely kept under control with extreme difficulty as I politely requested an interview with the bank manager whom I had rightly assumed was secreted behind the closed door the teller had visited several seconds before.
After many objections from the patient Bangkok Bank staff members and the security guards who’d been conversing with whoever was behind the closed door… through the closed door, I was eventually ushered into that mystic office where I was confronted with what appeared to the bank manager…… an impeccably dressed gentleman of undetermined age who was just rising from his padded chair to adorn his suit jacket for what he told me was his luncheon break at 9:30 am!
Well, it was around about then that the volcano finally gave way to pressure and violently erupted spewing molten cascades of extremely loud and multi-colored verbal displeasures and abuse to every corner, nook and cranny of the building and which I’m sure would be hard pressed to be rivaled in any waterfront bar on the planet.
The office door suddenly slammed open as a result of what I assume was a silent signal, and with a violent crash which knocked over a vase of plastic flowers, dislodged a picture, a clock and a calendar from the wall, while what I assumed was the manager’s umbrella snapped with a resounding crack when he tripped over it in his hastened step backwards against the wall at my sudden explosive outburst and tirade.
Pattaya’s Bangkok Bank Cleaned Out by Crazed Farang
However when I spun around at the sound, it wasn’t the normal Bangkok Bank’s security force outlined in the doorway I faced, but the full blown might of the law in what I thought at the time was at least 50% of the whole darned Pattaya police force who must have been alerted by security when they realized that something out of the ordinary was about to go down.
On furtively casting my eyes around like a trapped rodent at what had until a few seconds before been a normally crowded bank, I realized the whole bank seemed to have been evacuated by customers, and the staff who had remained seemed to be either white faced and cringing in fear, or warming up for a bit of unscheduled Thai boxing practice with me clearly being lined up as the punching (or kicking) bag.
In the meantime, my forever faithful and devoted girlfriend had vanished without a trace leaving me armed with no more than the spattering of Thai words I’d picked up most of which were mainly in the polite vein with a few endearments thrown in, which left me trying to explain to the police what had happened in words which amounted to thank you please my darling, never mind you lovely, I’m hungry and boom boom tirak.
Now I’m not going to suggest for one moment that the Thais don’t have a sense of humor because they certainly do, but how those police officers were able to keep a straight face through all this astonishes me to this day and it wasn’t until months later I learned that they had all cracked up in fits of laughter after releasing me from custody around 6 hours later.
It’s interesting to note that this story has a happy ending in that the following morning, while accompanied by my girlfriend having become mysteriously unvanished on my release from the soi 7 police station the day before, I went to the Siam Commercial Bank situated just down the street from my previous day’s harrowing experience, where I was able to open a new bank account into which I was able to deposit the cashier’s check I’d received from the Bangkok Bank in Soi 3 and all for a grand total outlay of 300 baht!
Needless to say, I’ve never done business with the Bangkok Bank again!
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