Yes Darling I Stop Working Bar

So, you have been to Thailand and fallen head over heels for your teeruk. You will be back, plans are made, she stops working, and in the meantime you agree to send money. All is well with the world…..

You are the fifth one that has made the same arrangement with her!

At significant danger to myself I have looked behind this façade of expectant domestic bliss and can tell you that the future missus can now turn to concentrating her attention on extracting money from any man she previously (or still does) know.

It goes like this:

After convincing ‘you’ that she will stop work bar she probably will. The ladies realise more and more men will check to see that have in fact stopped working at the bar. This does not mean she will not freelance. Most probably she will. Most of the ladies do however have a pool of call out customers that they can initiate intimate intimacies with when it suits them.

Now that is just the start. While she is “locked up” at home she uses her expertise, telephone and training to advance her financial position as follows:

She has (say) 100 numbers in the phone (you should have given her the later model with at least 500 memory capacity!) and she sends an SMS to her contacts:

“Dalring I have proprerm. Can you help me? I no work bar any more. I good gril now. Help me plees.”

After much toing and froing you will learn that money can help her solve her “proprerm” (need to pay rent is most common excuse- that farang consider housing as important is well understood by the girls) and she may even have scheduled a tryst with you. Sex with a good girl has to be better doesn’t it!

The girls in this case kept a book of excuses/reasons as to why they need money and entered names against each one to track what and with who they had tried. They could then try different reasons such as my mother is sick and I not want work bar to get money “plees” help.

One has to give the girls credit for being so well organised and I suspect also to any farang that has assisted them in compiling their fairy stories.

The response rate to this SMS appealathon is staggering. In the cases I saw and listened to, the girls had an estimated 80% plus success rate of getting money pledged and put into their accounts. They have learnt not to ask for too much, maybe 2 to 3,000 baht per customer. Remember that they are good girls now and if they do work they will tell you they are making stuffed frogs for toddlers at Soi 81 at 3,000 baht per month salary.

Now, if the lady has 100 contacts (they often have more) and receive 2,000 from each contact the maths are easy. She is possibly raking in 200,000 plus per month tugging on heart strings. Is there any one of you reading this and not thinking 2,000 baht is not too much to ask, she is a good girl now, and I will help?

I sat in a small room at Pra Kanong (a blue building) and watched 4 ladies playing this game with 6 mobile phones, writing pads to track “pledges” and eat som tum at the same time. They kept a handwritten book of English and Thai words nearby in the event there was something they did not understand. They each have a template message containing their bank account details.

They were sending messages to Sweden, Holland, Germany, Australia, Italy, Korea, Japan and others. In about 4 hours they had “pledges” of nearly 600,000 baht. I asked 1 of the ladies about a week later and was told that more than that was actually received. And that is in addition to your “retainer”!

These girls all came from an upstairs bar (level 2 bar at Nana Plaza) that occasionally closes with a glass floor. They sit and do this most of the day and should a “boyfriend call” excuses will be made by a friend saying she go eat, forget phone etc. (Beware if the friend tells you your teeruk is sick and at the doctor’s as that means you will end up being asked for money for the essential medical care). Chances are they in the midst of the next message despatch and simply don’t want to waste time on you (the one already committed and sucked in – in the meta and physical sense!). You will get your call returned by way of a message and then you call her of course.

It seems that boiler room techniques are now the domain of the girls.

Stickman's thoughts:

Yep, these scams have taken on a whole new dimension and the girls are playing the numbers game. This is one reason why local guys, especially teachers and the like who pay the girls “little money” are pretty much ignored by the girls in the bars. It is playing the long game which is much more profitable for them!