PATTAYA, Thailand – It usually appears in the evening. Not when you are at work, but when you are sitting down perhaps in a bar on Soi Buakhao, or at home, scrolling without much purpose. Facebook knows this. It always does. The man in the advertisement speaks English. He mentions offshore accounts. He talks about “safe returns” and “no tax complications”. Sometimes he even claims to live in Pattaya himself. That is not a coincidence.
A City Built for Targeting
Pattaya is many things, but above all it is predictable. Retirees. Long stay foreigners. Short term visitors with time on their hands. People moving money across borders, often without professional advice. People who do not quite trust banks, governments, or each other. From an advertiser’s point of view, it is perfect. Facebook’s targeting tools allow anyone with a credit card to aim directly at this audience by location, age, language, interests, and even lifestyle assumptions. The platform does not need to understand Pattaya. The data already does.
The Ads Nobody Sees in BangkokWhat appears on Facebook in Pattay
is not always what appears in Bangkok. Here, investment schemes are common. So are links to online casinos. So are “private funds”, “friends only opportunities”, and businesses that exist nowhere except behind a website and a Telegram account. These ads do not spread by accident. They are bought, approved, and delivered.
When Reporting Feels Pointless
Many residents have tried to report them. The result is usually silence. Or an automated reply stating that the advertisement “does not violate community standards”. It is hard not to notice that Facebook is far more efficient at collecting payment than at protecting users. By the time an ad disappears, the money is gone usually not Facebook’s.
Plausible Deniability, Local Consequences
Meta will say it cannot police everything. Technically true. But in Pattaya, where the same types of scams reappear week after week, the argument wears thin. This is not chaos. It is repetition. The platform may be global, but the damage is local, Retirees lose savings, new arrivals learn expensive lessons, Trust inside the community quietly erodes.
The Comfortable Distance
Facebook does not have an office on Beach Road. It does not sit in immigration queues. It does not explain to a 70 year old why his “guaranteed return” vanished. It simply invoices the advertiser and moves on.
A Pattaya Question
Pattaya has always lived with grey zones. That is not new. What is new is how efficiently those grey zones are now monetised by companies that publicly claim neutrality, safety, and responsibility. Perhaps the most honest description of Facebook in Pattaya is this, It is not a scammer. It is not a victim. It is the landlord collecting rent from whoever is willing to pay. And like many landlords in this city, it rarely asks what kind of business is happening behind the door.
Victor Wong (Peerasan Wongsri)
Victor Law Pattaya/Finance & Tax Expert
Email: <[email protected]> Tel. 062-8795414
