T.B.G.I. – Thai Bar Girl Investigations

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Admit it. Some people can’t even trust their own shadow. How you want to trust a beautiful slender girl you met in a Bangkok bar who is promising you eternal faithfulness and love. Maybe there’s a catch.

In Thailand, country of deep distrusts, there’s an own industry of people making a living from untrustworthy people. Take T.B.G.I. – Thailand Bar Girl Investigations. Detectives wo catch cheating Thai bar girls and save you money.

T.B.G.I.’s intro reads like this: So you met an amazing, sweet Thai girl … Nice. She worked in a go-go bar, beer bar, or massage parlor … Hmmm? And she promised to stop working and love only you while you are back home if you will just help her with a little money each month? Stop right there!!!

Caught the hook? As a warm-up, here’s a classic:




We tried to meet Sherlock Holmes in person. But guess what – no surprise: “An interview in person is simply out of the question,” T.B.G.I.’s Adam replied. “Please understand that our anonymity is one of our greatest professional assets and we can’t risk compromising that. Especially in light of the Stickman/Galt fiasco and the “outing” of another investigator in Pattaya a few years ago, it’s just not going to happen.”

An interview in good old written form it shall be then with Bangkok’s most sought-after private eye.

Adam, who are your clients?

Our clients are exclusively the male partner in a relationship (or wanting to start a relationship) with a Thai female (a real one, not a lady boy) with a past or current relationship to the commercial sex scene.

We realized from the start that over-specialization and trying to be all things to everyone was simply diluting our resources at best and likely to produce substandard results at worst. “Do one thing and do it well” is a guiding principle for us.

Other investigative agencies might try a general approach and we wish them well, but the field is too small and too competitive for any agency to have a versatile expertise in bar girl cases and bar boy cases and cheating husbands and missing persons and property recovery and … You get the point.

Our clients themselves are mostly white males in their 30s to their 50s, usually living in Western Europe, North America, Australia or New Zealand. But we do have clients of all ages and backgrounds except one: we don’t take on Thai clients. We let Thai-operated investigative agencies handle that.

A fair percentage of the clients we take on are based in Thailand part-time but work overseas, quite often in the oil and gas industry, the security field or doing reconstruction work in places like Iraq or Afghanistan. We have a running joke that we’re an unofficial department of Halliburton and KBR because of the number of cases we get from their employees and subcontractors.

Typically if they reside exclusively overseas they have one to five prior trips to Thailand under their belt. Generally they’ve got some experience with Thai culture (and more than a little with bar girl culture), they’ve read the message boards and forums, heard the horror stories and decide they can risk the odds but want us to get the facts for them.

You solve the cases?

The best answer to that question is: “Usually”. And that’s not trying to be funny, just pointing out that for any investigators to claim a 100% success rate would be a lie. Since the great majority of assignments involve surveillance on a person, and since that person has free will, who can guarantee what they will actually do during the active portion of the case?

What can do and always do is to simplify the case as much possible to try to successfully achieve the objective. This usually involves the client prioritizing what he wants to know.

It’s not that we blame a prospective client for any lack of focus, mind you. We understand that almost all of our new clients will be working with a private investigator for the first time, and that it will usually be in the context of some sort of confusion or emotional turmoil.

So we go through the issues with the client to find out what the real priorities are, then based on our experience lay out an operational plan for him. This way we have a much better chance of getting a meaningful result at the smallest possible cost to the client.

That’s all we can guarantee until the job starts and after that it’s a rare job that runs completely to plan although most of the time the case runs more or less to plan. When it doesn’t, you need to think fast.

At all times the confidential nature of the case is a top priority. We’d rather shut down a case early and make it up later even if at our own expense than have to explain to the client that we messed up his relationship.

The last phase of the case is fulfillment, delivering the report and supporting materials like photos to the client. Most of the time the outcome is pretty clear-cut, but some investigations have an ambiguous result for whatever reason. When that happens we make an effort to give the client all possible interpretations of our findings.

Any not-so-happy ending you recall?

Too many to recount actually, but most of them are simply a situation where the girl doesn’t keep her promise to quit the bar or at least stop going with customers. And there’s an odd phenomenon somewhat common to Pattaya and to a lesser degree Phuket where the girl does keep her promise to quit the bar, but with too much of the client’s money and too much time on her hands she self-destructs, gets involved with a bad crowd or drinks too much or goes through very negative personality changes.

We always strongly recommend to any client that if you can get the girl out the bar, the next step is to get the bar out of the girl. That means get her into a remedial education program, a language school, job training or formal employment if she’s got the pre- requisites for it.

We also remind them that there is the fundamental Thai need for a strong social network and this is a particularly acute problem for bar girls. Most of them have only their family back home and a few friends in the bar where they work. It’s very important to keep in mind that if the girl doesn’t have her friends in the bar, she needs friends somewhere and it’s much better for her to find them out there in the non-bar world.

One of the hardest bar-related dynamics to break apart is also one of the more unusual. It’s not unknown for a Thai butch lesbian (a “tom”) to have a stable of 3 to 10 straight girls working for them as bar girls. The tom uses psychological and emotional manipulation to keep her hold on the girls and sometimes supplies them with drugs making this a tough (almost impossible) nut to crack. The tom of course lives off the other girls’ wages and sponsorship money and they tend to be as nasty, violent and despicable as any pimp.

One particularly sad outcome to a case happened just after the New Year 2008. Our client had made an arrangement with his Thai girlfriend that she could keep her job in the bar so she could visit with her friends and draw a salary but wasn’t supposed to go with customers anymore. We did a compliance check on her in October and she seemed to be keeping her part of the deal, but when she dropped out of sight just after New Year the client for some reason assumed she’d taken off with a customer. We did some digging for him and the sad truth emerged that she’d died in a road accident while visiting her home village.

Any happy story?

Of course there are happy stories. There aren’t as many as we might wish to see, but from one quarter to one third of the girls will keep their promises to their sponsors. So although the bar is set fairly low for outcomes you might define as “happy”, they do occur.

With that said it’s still relatively rare to see a relationship go all the way and result in a marriage that lasts. Many of our clients just find it too taxing in the long run to keep up a long-distance relationship prior to marriage, and after marriage can’t relocate to Thailand or their Thai wife can’t master his native language or adapt to his culture.

And there’s the matter of trying to forge a relationship with a lady who has only eight or six years of poor quality Thai education and a very different world-view.

In spite of the many hurdles that need to be overcome there are some couples that manage it. So those would be the happy stories and we’re glad to play our part in it and get the couple past any initial period of mistrust or miscommunication.

One of the stranger happy stories we’ve seen was the case of a Thai girl who we can call Noy and a European guy we can call Freddy. Freddy had made a couple of long holiday trips to Thailand, taken Noy out of the bar a few times and always had a lot of fun with her. For one reason or another Freddy didn’t make another trip to Thailand for almost two years, but never quite forgot about Noy.

During those two years Noy had gotten a sponsorship opportunity from another farang who we can call Lars. Lars got her to quit the bar, paid off the modest mortgage on the family farm and set Noy up in a small business up-country. Noy kept her promises along the way, but Lars gradually fell out of her life by his own choice.

Freddy finally made his next trip to Thailand and went back to the bar looking for Noy. She wasn’t there and he couldn’t get any information on her, so he retained us to locate her for him which we did. It turned out Noy had never quite forgotten about Freddy either.

The last we heard they were married, settled in his country and expecting their first child later this year.

Oh, thinking of spies and such: Any high-tech involved? Does modern technology help you to track and trace?

The James Bond stuff? No, there’s nothing we routinely use that’s in any way cutting edge and rarely more sophisticated than a digital camera or a decent cell phone.

Because of the market segment we serve there’s no need for sophisticated bugging or tracking gear. And there’s the more general principle that you shouldn’t use more technology than you need to get the job done. The sophistication, if you want to call it that, is in experience, technique, and sometime just brass balls.

Also keep in mind that a lot of the cases we handle involve being just a face in the crowd. Carrying a Batman-style utility belt full of gadgets is a good way to draw attention to yourself and that’s generally counterproductive.

To give you an example, for every latest-generation digital SLR camera you see carried in Pattaya there’s another 50 ordinary tourist-grade cameras in someone’s pocket, out of sight. Which do you think is the least remarkable?

As a rule, the best approach when procuring any equipment is to do your homework and pay the little bit extra for gear that is “best of breed” among inconspicuous, off-the-shelf consumer products.

Have you ever been set up by a client? Payback time? To reveal your identity?

Not to our knowledge although we’re aware of the risks. Given that we are a specialized organization serving a very thin market segment, we’re probably not a high-priority target, but you never know.

We are however aware that there are some very aggressive players in the investigations game in Thailand. We try not to step on the toes of the Thai-owned agencies, for instance, given their deep links to local law enforcement.

But to be quite frank, the risk of being set up by a fake “client” is very small compared with the risk of a breach of trust with a real client. As we say on our website, it’s a cardinal rule of Thai (and Asian) society that you “don’t f*** with someone else’s rice bowl”. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to anticipate what could happen to an operative if it became known to a bar girl he was the one who got her sponsorship money cut off.

So we are aware that we walk a fine line, and with an eye to that we do take precautions.



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April 28, 2008 | Filed Under Being Farang, Nightlife & Entertainment, The Interview, The Thai Mind, Travel & Tourism 

Comments

7 Responses to “T.B.G.I. – Thai Bar Girl Investigations”

  1. The Expat Women’s Guide to Bangkok on September 10th, 2008 12.22 pm

    [...] chunks, I don’t really need to know that some poor sod paid over the going price, or how to investigate a Thai bar girl, or even the ins and outs of a man’s guide to Bangkok life (but I will [...]

  2. Tony on October 17th, 2008 4.32 pm

    I would like to know if you are able to investigate in Kraunaun near Khon Kaen?

    Regards Tony

  3. Pdog on January 23rd, 2009 5.04 pm

    Interesting read. I myself have been to Thailand a couple of times. Enjoyed the culture and the nigtlife, luckily was able to avoid the pitfalls you speak of. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t in the the thick of it, I was. Kept a good head, or two, if ya know what I mean.
    Anyhow, I have become very interested in a particular girl. She lives in Yasothon and by all accounts, our online correspondance over the last two months leads me to believe she could be that diamond in the ruff. However, one can’t be too careful these days. Your services might prove valuable following my visit to Yasothon in March. Interested?

  4. Adam (T.B.G.I.) on January 24th, 2009 10.23 am

    Pdog: We welcome your inquiry. Please direct it to thaibgi@gmail.com at your convenience.

    All: We apologize to anyone who may try to visit our website using the link in the article. It is currently offline while we work with the domain registrar to resolve some issues.

    In the interim a bare-bones version of our website may be viewed through the Internet Archives Wayback Machine and this will confirm the email address above as genuine.

    http://web.archive.org/web/20080115121452/www.thailand-investigations.com/

    Cordially,
    Adam (T.B.G.I.)

  5. Debbie on May 15th, 2009 11.54 pm

    I think I may have some work for you. Please email me at the address given.

  6. Gary Hunter on February 13th, 2010 2.32 pm

    I suspect my girlfriend of four years is cheating on me, I would like to have here tailed to see what she is up to when I am away. I live in Pattaya
    what are your charges for your service.

    Regards Gary Hunter

  7. Adam (T.B.G.I.) on February 14th, 2010 11.19 am

    Gary, our fees are outlined on our website:

    http://www.thailand-investigations.com/

    After you’ve had a chance to see what we can (and cannot) do for you, please get in touch with us by email so we can discuss this matter in confidence.

    thaibgi@gmail.com

    Respectfully,
    Adam (T.B.G.I.)

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