Bangkok firm behind 'Taobao Thailand' website accused of illegal yuan exchange for buyers of Chinese goods

Thai police have arrested the director of a Bangkok company behind a website called Taobao Thailand over an unlicensed yuan exchange and payment service for people buying goods from China.

Police Lt. Gen. Nathasak Chaowanasai, commissioner of the Central Investigation Bureau, said on Nov. 1 that the man, identified only as Prin, was taken into custody in Bangkok after a complaint from the Bank of Thailand, the Bangkok Post reported.

The central bank accused him of providing an unauthorized foreign exchange service through the websites fupay1688.com and taobao.co.th.

The sites converted other currencies into yuan for shoppers paying on platforms such as 1688, Taobao and Tmall, all owned by China's Alibaba Group.

Police allege five bank accounts were used for the service, processing transactions worth 170 million baht (US$5 million) over the past year. Officers seized four computers, five mobile phones and documents.

Chinese 100-yuan banknotes. Photo by Unsplash/Eric Prouzet

Thai Post identified the company as Taobao (Thailand) Co. Ltd. and Prin, 38, as its authorized director. Police are taking legal action against both the company, as a legal entity, and Prin personally on suspicion of running a regulated payment service and a foreign exchange and international money transfer business without a license, the newspaper reported.

When the company promoted a Thai-language version of taobao.co.th in April 2024, the Thai business daily Prachachat Turakij reported that Taobao Thailand was separate from the Taobao platform in Alibaba Group.

The company said at the time that it was authorized to use Taobao's official data interface to show the platform's products to Thai shoppers, and that it checked goods and arranged international shipping for their orders. The business daily found the firm had been registered in November 2022 as a freight forwarding and customs clearance agent.

Alibaba's own Taobao launched a Thai-language version in 2025 that lets users browse in Thai and pay in baht, the South China Morning Post reported.

Officers searched the company's premises, a three-story townhouse, under a court warrant and found five employees at work, Thai Post reported. Police found the company had never been licensed by the Bank of Thailand to provide payment or currency exchange services.

Users who signed up on the two websites were given electronic wallets they could top up, withdraw from and use to pay for orders from China, while the sites also exchanged yuan and transferred it into Alipay accounts, police said.

Two of the accounts, used to receive and pay out yuan, were linked to accounts used in technology crime, with sums totaling more than 270,000 baht ($8,000), according to data from the national police's anti-online scam center. Police said they would widen the investigation into those links.