A Thailand survey finds only 4% of scam victims ever report it

Most people who lose money to a scam in Thailand never tell anyone with the power to act on it. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance surveyed 1,290 Thai adults and found that scam exposure is rising fast while reporting stays almost flat. If a scam reaches someone, report it to the authorities even when no money was lost, because the survey shows almost nobody does.

The headline figures track a country where scams have become close to universal experience. Seventy-nine percent of participants encountered a scam in the past year, up from seventy-two percent in 2025. Confidence has not kept pace with that exposure: seventy percent say they are confident in recognizing scams, yet fifty-eight percent of those who actually encountered one went on to interact with the scammer. Confidence and contact are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where damage happens.

What the numbers add up to

Across all respondents, ten percent lost money or shared personal information that led to a financial loss. That is a tenth of the entire sample, not just the group who engaged with a scammer. Among the people who became victims, the consequences went beyond money. Seventy-two percent said the experience affected their mental wellbeing. Sixty percent said they had been scammed more than once.

Only four percent of respondents reported a scam to the authorities. Set against the ten percent who suffered a financial loss, that means most financial losses in this survey never reached an official record. A survey like this is itself a form of accounting that the reporting system does not otherwise produce. Without it, the scale of exposure, the repeat-victimisation rate, and the size of the reporting gap would stay invisible, because police figures only capture the four percent who came forward.

Why the repeat rate matters

The sixty percent repeat-victimisation figure is the detail easiest to miss and hardest to ignore. A person scammed once is, according to this data, more likely than not to be scammed again. That points to something structural rather than a single moment of bad luck: whatever exposed someone the first time is still there the second time. A survey that captures this gives anti-scam organisations and regulators a number to design around, rather than guesswork about where repeat harm concentrates.

The study does not name which scam types drove these numbers or how the sample was recruited beyond the total count. What it establishes clearly is the shape of the problem: high exposure, moderate overconfidence, low reporting, high repeat rates. That shape is now measured rather than assumed, which is what makes the figures usable by anyone deciding where to put resources next.

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