Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing ascertaining ownership of Thai property. What are we talking about here? Well this is what sometimes is referred to as due diligence, where you are undertaking due diligence to ascertain whether or not someone who claims to own a piece of property, does in fact own that piece of property as part of the process of conveyancing it, in our cases to our clients. What are we talking about here? 

I know it sounds strange but it still comes up. There are scams that still come up here in Thailand involving folks pretending to own something and sell it that don't own it and pretend to sell it. It does happen. There's a great book, it is kind of an old book, it's called the Telephone Booth Indians and it was written, I think it was written in the 1930s. The Telephone Booth Indians, they called them that because they basically would squat in phone booths. What would happen is these folks were sort of scam artists and they would go out into the city of New York in this case, and put up signs on buildings that they didn't own that said "For Sale" or "For Rent, contact so and so” and they would sit in a telephone booth and when the phone rang, they pretended to be the owner of that property and they worked out a way to get money off somebody for something they didn't own and that was kind of a common scam apparently back in the 1930s. It was common enough that an entire pretty in-depth series of newspaper reports were written about it that ended up becoming a book.

Yeah it is still around. I am not going to say it is like an everyday occurrence, but every now and again we will be doing some due diligence and we will find out that somebody is saying something that doesn't comport with the way the documentation is in the actual Land Office Registry or depending on the circumstances. Meanwhile, it may not necessarily be that this is coming from a place of nefariousness; there may not be malice involved, but sometimes we deal with similar circumstances where you think you are dealing with the owner but it turns out it is mom and dad who passed away, that the title still hasn't cleared through what is called the succession process, we call it probate in the Common Law System. They haven't processed that through the Courts so clear title, you have still got to deal with some of that stuff before clear title can pass over. So these are all issues that you need to be aware of when dealing with due diligence here in the Kingdom of Thailand.