Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing folks who have been arrested for overstay here in Thailand. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Phuket News, that is thephuketnews.com, the article is titled: Phuket Immigration crackdown results in 188 arrests in one year. But quoting further, I thought this was really interesting: "The Phuket Office of the Immigration Bureau has entered its second year of the "Crime Free Phuket" Campaign with the arrest of a foreign man on overstay charges this Saturday (November 4). In the previous 12 months of the campaign there were 188 arrests, with 66 of them on overstay charges."

As we have discussed in many other videos, overstay is taken far more seriously in Thailand than it once was in times past. If you go back now at this point it is probably 7, 8 years, at least 6 or 7 years, when the Immigration Office first announced that they would not only begin Blacklisting folks for being on overstay but also that the Immigration Office here in Thailand would start taking more proactive measures with respect to enforcing relevant Immigration Law and we have seen this. I have gotten emails and talked to a number of folks who have actually had Immigration Officers show up on their doorstep. We have even seen Immigration be able to use via the digitization of basically the Immigration record system, basically the Immigration database if you will through the digitization of that and the increasingly high level of technology; I imagine there has got to be at least something akin to AI that is also helping with this as well, Thai Immigration is now able to in real time, target and detain and even deport folks who are on overstay because they are able to see people's visas who are expired and the fact that they have no record of having left Thailand so they know they are in the country and they are able to then cross reference that with addresses associated with the person in question and they are actually using this data to actively go out and arrest people and deport them for overstay.

This is really important. I am not trying to scare people. For example tourists, you are not really going to have to worry about this kind of thing but if you are looking to come to live in Thailand, the era of being able to do that in a very, quite honestly in a very nonchalant manner, just sort of going into overstay. I knew people for years, if you go back 15 years ago I remember knowing people that had been on multi-year overstays and the only result of it was whenever they left the country they had to be prepared to pay a 20,000 Baht fine. Now that is no longer possible. There is a Blacklist now associated with overstay and on top of that as we have discussed in other videos, Thai immigration is targeting overstayers. They are going out and enforcing relevant Immigration Law on overstay and this is resulting in more and more people being arrested. As noted previously, in Phuket there has been 66 arrests for overstay just in the past year. That is a substantial number and I think it is indicative of a trend moving forward.