Thailand's most profitable bank forced to pay beauty queen after $124,000 AI scam

Thailand's Civil Court has ordered Kasikornbank to compensate Thai-British actress Charlotte Austin after ruling the bank failed to flag the after-midnight transfers she made while being scammed out of 4 million baht (US$124,000).

The court ruled on July 8 that Kasikornbank must pay 1 million baht, plus 5% annual interest from Dec. 8, 2024, to Miss Charlotte Co Ltd, the firm that manages the Phuket-born actress's finances, Bangkok Post reported.

The bank was also ordered to cover a proportional share of court fees and 20,000 baht in legal costs.

The headquarters of Kasikorn Bank are pictured in Bangkok, Thailand, Jan. 5, 2016. Photo by Reuters

Austin, the fifth runner-up in the Miss Grand Thailand 2022 pageant, was among the first Thai public figures identified as a victim of call-center gangs operating across the region, and her case pushed other victims to report to police.

She was 25 when she received a video call on Dec. 7, 2024 from a man posing as an official from Thailand's Department of Special Investigation.

He told her she was suspected of money laundering in a case tied to Stark Corporation, a Thai firm then at the center of a major fraud scandal, according to the South China Morning Post.

He ordered her to transfer 4 million baht so authorities could "verify" her innocence, keeping her on the video call the entire time.

She made three transfers through Kasikornbank's mobile app, two of them after midnight.

Police later said the network operated from an office building in Poipet, Cambodia, used artificial intelligence to swap the callers' faces during video calls, and had targeted at least 163 people, SCMP reported.

After realizing she had been deceived, Austin had her account frozen, reported the case and helped police trace the offenders, Bangkok Post reported.

A criminal court jailed four members of the gang for six to seven years in May 2025 and ordered them to jointly repay the 4 million baht, The Nation reported.

Miss Charlotte Co Ltd sued for the full amount, arguing the bank had breached its deposit agreement by processing plainly abnormal, high-risk transfers without detecting them or issuing a warning.

Charlotte Austin, 27, a Thai-British actress and model who was the fifth runner-up at Miss Grand Thailand 2022. Photo courtesy of Instagram

Kasikornbank countered that its fraud-monitoring systems met industry standards and that the transfers had been handled as ordinary transactions.

The bank was Thailand's most profitable lender in 2025, posting a net profit of 49.6 billion baht (about $1.5 billion), the highest of the country's commercial banks, based on full-year results reported by The Nation.

The court accepted that the first transfer, 2 million baht sent at 5 p.m., was a normal transaction the bank had no reason to link to a scam.

It found the second and third transfers, together worth 2 million baht and made one after another past midnight, were abnormal enough that the bank should have caught them.

Because Austin had made the transfers herself, the court found her equally at fault and split the liability evenly, leaving the bank to cover half the after-midnight losses.

The decision applied an amended emergency decree in force since April 2025 that shares responsibility for fraud losses among banks, telecom operators, online platforms and users according to each party's negligence, with courts setting the split.

The ruling sets a precedent for holding financial institutions accountable for how they handle suspicious transactions, especially late at night, Austin's lawyer Nitithorn "Lawyer James" Kaewto told Bangkok Post.