Thailand Celebrity Walks Free as Forex 3D Mastermind Gets 49,000 Years

Bangkok's Criminal Court delivered a dramatic and divisive verdict on August 13 that reignited public debate over how financial fraud implicates public figures. Actress Savika “Pinky” Chaiyadej, along with her mother and brother, was acquitted of all charges in the multi-billion-baht Forex 3D case, while former scheme executive Apiruk Kothi and four co-defendants were found guilty.

The court imposed a combined nominal prison term of 49,110 years on the five convicted individuals and issued a financial restitution order of 4.911 billion baht. The staggering figure is not a literal sentence but an accumulative total derived from penalties across thousands of individual counts, that is a mechanism of Thai criminal law that communicates the breadth of wrongdoing rather than the time any individual will actually serve behind bars. A comparable December 2024 ruling in a related case saw three defendants receive nominal terms of 49,125 years, ultimately capped at 20 years each under Thailand's statutory limits.

The Forex 3D scheme, which prosecutors alleged operated between November 2015 and September 2020, was constructed on a seductive promise: hand over your money, let a team of professional traders work for you, and collect guaranteed returns. The minimum entry point was initially set at US$500, later raised to US$2,000, with investors assured of a full guarantee on their principal alongside profits or dividends. None of that, according to prosecutors, was ever real. The funds were not channelled into foreign exchange trading at all.

Thailand's Department of Special Investigation received complaints and formally accepted the case in 2019, after thousands of people reported losing money. By that point, over 9,800 victims had been identified, with combined losses exceeding 2.48 billion baht.

The investigation eventually ensnared Apiruk in early 2021, when authorities arrested him at a condominium in Bangkok's Thonglor district. Among the items seized were a Lamborghini, luxury watches, and banking records which are the archetypical trappings of fraud proceeds masquerading as success.

Pinky, who was initially denied bail and detained at the Central Women's Correctional Institution, maintained throughout proceedings that she had participated in Forex 3D purely as an investor and had never solicited or recruited others into the scheme. The court accepted that position.

The case bears an uncomfortable parallel to investment fraud patterns seen across Southeast Asia, where celebrities and influencers lend credibility to schemes that drain ordinary retail investors of their savings. In Malaysia, regulatory bodies including the Securities Commission Malaysia and Bank Negara Malaysia have in recent years flagged numerous unauthorised forex investment platforms, and the country has seen its own share of high-profile fraud cases entangling public personalities. The Forex 3D verdict serves as a sobering reminder that in the absence of proper due diligence, participation in an attractive financial scheme, regardless of intent, can carry consequences that extend far beyond financial loss.