A PATTAYA PUZZLE – HI YO SILVER PLEASE GIVE ME A CALL

Seems buying property on the eastern seaboard of Thailand is getting easier by the day now – You can even pay your deposit through PayPal.

But one customer got alarmed having put down US$1000 for an off plan condo being built by a company called CW Asset. According to his records Paypal notified him that payment had been sent to Mr. Ian Silver someone he had never heard of before.

Now it’s imperative that when buying property in Thailand (or anywhere for that matter) that the money trail goes to the seller of the property direct so in this case the customer wanted to know about the mystery man.

He said he did not get an answer from CW Assets so he asked me to find out.  But first bear in mind that if you search the internet under the name Ian Silver some nasty stuff is going to come bouncing back at you from Thailand’s eastern seaboard, like for instance this Ian Silver below..

A Mr. Ian Silver highlighted on Asia Trade Online turns out to be another Pattaya publisher.

This American guy is reported to have disappeared with income from a condo project called ‘Royal View Talay’, which never got built allegedly running off with millions,  so I can understand the clients’ concern. He was referred to as Richard Ian Silver.

So I called CW Assets and got a guy who called himself Richard Richie and who said he was Canadian. He did not appear to know anyone called Ian Silver. In that case why was CW Asset using Silver’s name on a PayPal of CW Asset.

 He said he knew nothing.  I said I would put my question in writing which I did. Who is Ian Silver?


Back came his boss, Imorn, in force the following day. If you search her name you can find she is a prolific writer in the property business. She has even written for the Pattaya Mail newspaper about her condo projects – although the newspaper did not always disclose she was writing about her own projects.

Imorn

Date: Tuesday, April 2, 2013, 4:27 AM

Hi Mr. Drummond,
 Thank you for your inquiry. Happy to assist you. 
 CW Asset Co., Ltd. is a 100% Thai company  owned by the Luekhamharn family and I am the managing director. You may find our company papers, chanote and shareholder ID here.
http://www.abatalaycondo.com/duediligence.html
http://www.abatalaycondo.com/en/duediligence.html
Our Bang Saray Beach Condo “A” is close to completion and we expect our buyers to be moving in this summer.
Construction of Bang Saray Beach Condo”B” has started with completion summer2014.
We have received approval from the Thai Navy for CW Ocean View Condo which is schedule to begin construction in August 2013. Abatalay Condo EIA approval is being processed and construction will 
begin December 2013.

Additional company info is available at http://cwasset.com/condo_developments.html
This person Ian Silver is not a shareholder in any of our companies nor authorized to act on behalf 
of  CW Asset Co or At Jomtien Co., Ltd.. 
We have NOT requested our buyers make payments to this person and would appreciate any information you can supply us with concerning this serious matter.
We caution our buyers in our purchase contract NOT to make payments to anyone 
other than CW Asset accounts. Our agents are expressly forbidden from taking CW Asset
customer payment directly. 
We have our own official CW Asset paypal  account where buyers may make reservation 
Deposits http://cwasset.com/Online_Payments.html
We have received a similar inquiry from one of our buyers regarding this other paypal account.
This buyer has been quite erratic. (Sentence deleted for legal reasons)
We have now discovered  his motivation was buyer remorse*. He has request a refund to which we have agreed.
Before you write something that may have a negative effect on our brand, we would appreciate 
the opportunity to review any documentation you have about this unofficial paypal account you are saying has received our buyer’s reservation payment.
Buyers, staff and shareholders may suffer due to what you may write. We hope you will give us the 
opportunity to examine what you have collected and then properly respond. 
From what we have heard you are a moral, ethical journalist with no intent to harm innocent parties. We appreciate the chance to investigate this matter fully and to cooperate with your request.
Best regards,
Ms. Imorn Luekhamharn, Managing Director, CW Asset Co., Ltd”.

That answer seems to have sorted things out. But wait. Why would 
buyers, staff and shareholders suffer? This is just one buyer asking who Ian Silver is and Imorn has never heard of (Richard) Ian Silver, right?

And they have admitted receiving the payment. And Paypal appears to have notified the client that they have sent the cash to Mr. Ian Silver. It appears to be there in black and white from Paypal. After tossing and turning I got up in the middle of the night and sent them a copy of the Paypal receipt with Ian Silver’s name on it.

“Thank you for your prompt reply. I will get back to your client. This appears to be the receipt he says he got after paying US$1000 through the Paypal link on your site pm March 27 2013. I hope there is confusion”.

Back came Imorn again.

“Hi Mr. Drummond,
Thank you for your email. You seem to be burning the midnight oil, your email arrived at 2.21am? My mother used to say take care of your health, get a good night sleep, things may look different in the morning. 
I have attached a screen shot of our CW Asset Paypal account profile. 
The same Paypal “pay now” buttons that are on our website online payment page.
You can clearly see that what you have sent us could not have come from our CW Asset online payment page.
Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity and time to respond. 
A company brand is a fraigle thing. It takes years of hard work and good results to
build but just a moment to destroyed the innocent lives and investments of staff, 
investors and customers.

Bang Saray Beach Condo – almost completed

We are trying hard to make a name for CW Asset Co in Pattaya for selling andbuilding good quality affordable oceanside condominiums. 

If you visit our almost completed Bang Saray Beach Condominium you will see our buyers are getting more for our lowest Pattaya priced condos then they have paid. Most importantly it is being delivered on time.

Best regards,
Ms. Imorn Luekhamharn
Managing Director

Now innocent lives are stake!  But I had made one mistake the customer had not paid through the CW Asset site but direct through the PayPal site. But the receipt is still as clear as night and day. What is going on here?
At this stage I should point out that I do not know Imorn or Richie so why would I want to destroy them. Meanwhile Ms Imorn was emailing the customer:

Attached is both the image you sent us and one forwarded to us by Mr. Drummond.
They are the same but different.
Yours image is of a screen shot showing an Internet Explorer browser and
his shows a screen shot of Firefox browser. 
Two different browser, two different computers, two different people accessing your paypal account?
Has your paypal account been hacked and this all a fabrication?
Is this a misunderstanding? I hope so because there is so much at stake which will effect
100’s of people that have purchased condos from our company.
We have received your bank details and your reservation deposit refund will be processed soon.
I hope we still have a company left after Andrew Drummond is done with us over something that 
has nothing to do with CW Asset Co. 
Any assistance you can provide in this regards would be greatly appreciated by our staff, over 200 
condo buyers and investors, innocent parties who might be greatly damaged by what is written about CW Asset.
Regards,
Ms. Luekhamharn

Now its 200+ innocent parties and Andrew Drummond is apparently bringing down a company, which he is not, and Imorn does not understand that the client has a computer at home and a computer at work which have different browsers which are both picking up Ian Silver’s name after he checks into PayPal.
.
And then there was this:

 Hi Mr. Drummond,

My name is Ms. Luekhamharn and I am an educated 
Thai woman with a B.A in Marketing and just finishing my Masters degree in Education.

I can see when something is not right and am not shy about expressing my self especially when it comes to CW Asset Co or my staff, customers and investors.

We have spoken to a few people that think you made a mistake sending us the composite image
of our website online payment page and some unknown persons Paypal overview. It suggests 
they are related and that just is not true.

You have not told us the customers name, nor sent us any proof but since we have had only one online charge recently, we know. We know him well after receiving dozens of erratic email’s to multiple staff members and agents. 

Some of our 100’s of satisfied customers come to our office and we run their credit card in person on our Kbank credit card machine. Only a very few use our official CW Asset online payment.

This customer is truly a person who has denigrated our brand with the sole motivation being to get a refund, because per his condo reservation form he agree and signed a statement that the deposit was non refundable. 

 Yet we are making an exception and are processing his refund. His caviler attitude and disregard for the effect his behavior may have on 100’s of innocent people is shocking.

 After consulting our lawyer to make sure we were not breach any privacy issues I have attached a copy of our official CW Asset Paypal My Account overview with a customer’s credit card transaction that I am sure you will recognize.

Imorrn’s screen shot. The client appears to be the same

What this customer has given to you did not come from CW Asset, go to CW Asset or have anything to do with CW Asset. That should be evident now.

I hope this is the end of this, we have all wasted too much time dealing with this person antics. We need to focus on continuing to build a quality brand that delivers affordable condominiums. 

Then the client sent me this. 

Client screen shot

and this

Sent to Ian Silver then an email followed by Richie’s email

I replied to Imorn:

Thank you for the rather dramatic note and good luck with your Masters.  I now have in my possession further paypal details. These details show the name Ian Silver and two emails – one of those is to Richie@cwasset and further notes the transaction will appear on his paypal bill as CW Asset. This might lead me to suspect that Richard Richie is Richard Ian Silver.

You have presented no evidence that the customer in question has denigrated your brand. Nor is he being cavalier. To use caution in the foreign property market on the Eastern seaboard is a prerequisite. 

You will already be aware that there is information on the net that Richard Ian Silver, formerly of Royal View Talay, has re-invented himself and has been selling property in Bang Saray.

So once again who is Ian Silver?

PS: I hope your lawyer did not charge you for telling you you cannot be in breach of your own privacy. It would be a frightful waste.

Ms Imorn seemed a little peeved.

“Mr. Drummond, Thank you for your reply. This is a most serious matter, treating it as anything  less is egregious. Problems for CW Asset Co. effect (sic) our customers that have purchased almost 200 Million Baht of condos in our developments.

Who is Ian Silver? In an internet Google search for Ian Silver we found 90,500,000 entries so your guess is as good as ours as to who is Ian Silver. 

You have questions for Mr. Richie? You will have to contact him directly. Mr. Richie was not authorized to speak with journalist. Consequently his services to CW Asset have been terminated. 

 Finally, our customers’ privacy is sacred. We wanted to be especially careful that no laws were breached in forwarding our customer payment details to a third party.

Certainly not a frightful waste to be sure we are doing things legally.

 We have and will answer any questions to the best of our ability that you or anyone else may have. 

 We have spent a considerable amount of time on this to the determent of our business. As for CW Asset, our staff, customers and investors there is nothing more that we can do but suffer at the hands of the media. So much hard work, good results and people’s lives down the drain.

Regards,
Ms. Imorn Luekhamharn

Now people’s lives are ‘going down the drain’ and Richie has allegedly lost his job for talking to me, but I still do not know why Ian Silver is turning up on a client’s PayPal acknowledgement.

Dear Ms Imorn,
I am not interested in the 90.5 million entries for Ian Silver on the internet I am only interested in the Ian Silver on the CW Asset PayPal account.

This latest letter from you particularly the following paragraph smacks of amateur dramatics. 
 “As for CW Asset, our staff, customers and investors there is nothing more that we can do but suffer at the hands of the media. So much hard work, good results and people’s lives down the drain.”

Why should your customers suffer? You have announced that your project Bang Saray Condo is almost finished and is almost sold out. Are they not going to get their condos?

I am sad to hear that you have fired Mr. Richie for talking to the media. Could he not go to the Labour court after most of his responses were along the lines “I do not know what you are talking about”? Further I thought you both had a very close relationship.

 Still I have heard that the property business can be merciless.

 So once again why is Ian Silver on a CW Asset paypal account along with Richie?





I HEARD NO MORE.  


But a readers of this site have also been burning the midnight oil. By tracking down domain names one has found a common denominator linking abatalay.com, cw.assets, cwventure and a website call longvideos. There are others too including go2it.net which is where Mr. Silver has an email address. These sites were bought by someone using a ‘wild246’ gmail. Whose email  is that?  Mr. Ian Silver.

Then another reader checked the Google analytics ID for cwasset.com UA-3564411 and found that bangsaraybeachcondo, cwoceanview, abatalaycondo, pattayainfo and imornluekhamharn are all being monitored from the same google account.

Why the paranoia? Why are the customers in danger?

The company has three projects at the moment Bang Saray Beach Condominium, due to be finished in two months they say, plus two off plan condos  CW Ocean View Condo in Bang Saray and Abatalay Condo. 
  
The point is this. And all buyers should beware. If you are paying for property in Thailand do it through an honest lawyer.

I am not saying the Ian Silver mentioned here is the Richard Ian Silver named in connection with Royal View Talay but I share the concerns of the complainant about his PayPal receipt.

The client insists he has only made one payment. Can anyone explain the confusion here? Is there something staring me in the face that I am missing? Is someone speaking with a forked tongue?

In general when dealing with foreign property dealers in Pattaya beware. It would appear that all some of them need for a work visa is cash! You can ignore almost everything many of them say unless you can see it in English on a contract and that contract is an accurate translation of the Thai contract.

Many so called developers are not cashed up. They need your cash before they even lay the foundations.

Watch out especially for sinking fund charges, and charges for utilities when you move in. Some developers are enjoying a fancy life style on these charges alone.

And satisfy yourself that the developer has the cash to the finish the project if you are buying off plan. Here’s one good way of raising it.