Pharmacist scammed in Facebook mask purchase

 | Mon 16 Mar 2020 15:42 ICT

CityNews – 16th March 2020, Reporters were contacted by a 34 year old pharmacist from a pharmacy in Chiang Mai city who claims to have bought 200,000 baht’s worth of face masks from a 24 year old seller on Facebook, but never received her order.


According to the pharmacist, she was contacted by the 24 year old on Facebook and the two began to chat. Over the course of some time she was told that the 24 year old had thousands of face masks and that for hundreds of thousands of baht she could buy in bulk at a good rate. The order, according to the pharmacist, never arrived. Following some negotiations, some tens of thousands of baht was returned, but the rest wasn’t.
The pharmacist said that the reason she fell for the scam was because the seller had shared copies of her ID card with her and had also only asked her for a 60% deposit, which came to 296,250 baht, explaining that the remainder can be paid on delivery.
But when it came time to delivery she was told that the prices had gone up due to demand. The pharmacist therefore asked her money back which was when the negotiations began. To date, she is still owed around 200,000 baht. When the pharmacist told the seller that she was about to report the case to the police, she was told that if she did she would not see any of her money back at all. The pharmacist told reporters to please spread the word to everyone that money is hard to come by these days and to try not to hurt or scam other people as everyone is in the same boat. She went on to say that scamming money of such life-saving matters of medical supplies during this time is also unconscionable.
Police say that they have all the information they need to investigate this claim.