Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the difference between legality and just sort of 'getting away with it'. It is kind of a constant refrain when you are talking, well at least for me when I am talking to Expats here in Thailand, where they ask me things like just off hand, "well can I do this?" and "can I do that?" and by the way, some of those questions I enjoy, some of them it's like I don't know, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin! Sometimes it gets a little attenuated from reality I guess. 

The reason for the video is I will often get responses when people say "well you know, I'm here on like", this is a for example, this is just a hypothetical, "I'm here in Thailand on a Retirement Visa, but I want to work in my wife's restaurant." My initial response that is "no you can't do that, Retirement Visas are not work authorized." Then this hypothetical person will say well "so and so is doing it, I've seen them do it." That notion is conflating 'getting away with something' with being legal and that is a major mistake in my opinion here in Thailand. Yeah people can get away with things, I mean things go unnoticed. Law enforcement in Thailand can't be everywhere at once, they are not omnipresent, but long story short, in the long run you are playing against the odds in the sense that, if there is a certainty that something is illegal, if it is ever noted by the relevant law enforcement authorities, you are going to have a major issue. It is just a bad idea to sort of operate on the presumption that you are just going to "get away with something" in perpetuity. 

We really saw this in earnest back when the Blacklist was imposed in Thailand. A lot of people that had stayed in Thailand for decades in some cases in overstay, just kind of shrugged it off. I kind of get it because they had been here for years and it had never really been a problem. Well when they brought that in, they were serious about it. I saw multiple, we did videos on it at the time, multiple people who had been here for decades got deported which arguably they shouldn't have been here in overstay to begin with but these were people that had lived in one specific place for a very prolonged period of time and then they were deported from that place and they are not able to come back. That is a situation where ‘getting away with it’, it is sort of like Dave Chappelle's When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong; this is kind of one of those situations where getting away with it led to a real problem. So again, never a good idea to conflate legality with just getting away with something.