Chamoy Thipyaso

Chamoy Thipayaso is an employee of the Petroleum Authority of Thailand. She is known for receiving the world's longest prison sentence of lifetime imprisonment 141,078 years for her involvement in a pyramid scheme that defrauded more than 16,000 Thais and is estimated to have been worth between $200–300 million.[1]

Mae Chamoy Fund

In the late 1960s Thipayaso started a chit fund called the Mae Chamoy Fund, which was made to look like an oil share with high returns.[1] Due to Thipayaso's connections with the Air Force and Petroleum Authority, the fund was able to sustain itself for a remarkably long time.[2] Connections to the military were a huge factor in political and business power, and so its apparent military backing made the scheme seem legitimate.

The scheme drew in 16,231 clients, and was not shut down until the mid-1980s.[1]

Arrest and prison sentence

The fund had a large number of politically powerful investors from the military and even the Royal Household and as such there were calls for the government to bail out the banks and the chit funds. After discussions with King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the nature of which were not made public, the Mae Chamoy Fund was shut down and Chamoy Thipayaso was arrested. She was held in secret by the air force for several days and her trial was not held until after the losses for the military and royal personnel involved had been recovered.[3]

On 27 July 1989 Thipayaso and seven accomplices were convicted of corporate fraud. She was sentenced to a total of 141,078 years or life imprisonment sentence in prison but Thailander law at the time stated that the maximum sentence that could be served for fraud was 20 years. In actuality, she only served about eight years of the sentence.[1]

gollark: (*self*-replicated because it's potatOS)
gollark: It is merely patterns of bits self-replicated onto various hard drives.
gollark: I mean, PotatOS "exists", but isn't a physical object.
gollark: Not really.
gollark: i.e. the physical processes involved in the brain do not actually work the same if you swap all the atoms for... identical atoms.

References
  1. Chungsiriwat, Grissarin (2013). Thailand At Random. Didier Millet. p. 83. ISBN 9814385263.
  2. dduane. "chit funds, crowdfunding and p2p banking (II)". PRACTICAL STOCK INVESTING. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  3. Handley, Paul (2006). The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej. Yale University Press. pp. 309. ISBN 9780300106824.
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