Originally Posted by Kinch:
Several years ago in Bangkok an American businessman was stabbed to death in Sukhumvit road by his taxi driver because he queried a 100 Baht overcharge.
It is not unheard of for the sons of powerful people to just pull out guns in high end night clubs and whack someone who looked the wrong way at their girlfriend(s). You'll never hear about it. Still happens.
You work for a major accounting firm and get retained to go do an audit of a Thai firm on behalf of a foreign shareholder and find something fishy. You might get whacked. It's happened.
You go to Koh Samui for a nice break in a 5-star resort. The last time the Bangkok government tried to send an official down there to regularise land records, he got whacked.
You complain about your plastic surgeon after the fact. He'll probably have you whacked too. It's cheap. The surgery and the hitman.
It goes on and on and on. Don't flatter yourself that you are safe because you don't patronise hookers. You're probably in less danger than the kind of retard goes to Pattaya or hangs around sleazy bits of Huahin after dark... but you're not safe and you have zero legal rights. Yes. Zero.
People are fooled by the apparent modernity and the Thai smile. It's all surface. You can have good times there, but any time you see a crack in the surface, run like hell.
Aside about Thais and smiles and being Wai-ed all the time. Unless you have actually lived there for some time and gotten to understand the culture a bit, you're not qualified to have an opinion about their manners and friendliness. This is a totally alien culture. A smile can mean many different things. Only one version of it means 'happy to see you'. Similarly a wai can be reverential, polite, neutral, or even contemptuously dismissive. Guess which one most tourists get