Sponsorship Doesn't Work

He’s been coming to Thailand for 15 years, had a one-year stretch incountry and has a Thai wife. He's been around the block and should know better.

She’s been on the game for at least four years yet retains a certain sweetness that can reel in even the most learned punters. Her looks intact, her English great, she knows just what customers want and how to satisfy them.

And then there was me. Years experience looking into these girls’ backgrounds and even more years, as The Big Chili magazine once put it, performing the role of "Bangkok’s Agony Aunt".

It was not going to be an easy assignment and I considered turning it down. Her known haunts are the various freelancer venues up and down Sukhumvit. That makes her hard to find. I could be in Gulliver’s and she could be in the Biergarten. I could be in Nana Disco and she could be in Spice Club. She’s not employed at any one venue and her salary is not going to be cut if she doesn’t go to work on any given night. There are many freelancer joints, thousands of freelancers and I have to find her. You get the picture, it’s not going to be easy.

The client’s goals are simple. He wants her observed. Is she going out to these venues? After collecting well over $US 1,000 equivalent as he left the airport several months ago, she promised she would never go to those places again. He sends this amount to her every month. But as a keen reader of this site, very much a breeding ground for putting doubt into even the most optimistic punter’s mind, this long-time Stickman reader was concerned and got in contact.

I explained the difficulty with freelancers is finding them. If I was to undertake the task, he would need to be able to tell me where she would be at a given time, preferably around 9 or 10 PM, so I could follow her and see where she went. A Friday or Saturday would be preferable. Then we would know.

He had an idea. He would arrange for him and her to chat online at a certain time. She always used the same Internet café, located not far from her condo which in turn was not far from the nightlife areas, walking distance in fact. So it was arranged. They would be chatting online at 9 PM.

It's ironic really. On his last trip he bought her a laptop. Cost 55,000 baht. The best in the shop. She said she wanted to chat online and webcam with him every day. So he bought the laptop. She never got an internet connection and never once used that computer to contact him. Since leaving her at Suwannaphum 6 months earlier he had seen her precisely twice on webcam. That was it.

I made it to the net café around 8:45, grabbed the computer with the best vantage point and started surfing the net. It was a small place with less than ten terminals. At a bit after 9:00 PM she enters and sits right next to me. What luck!

I am a little surprised to see that she is in typical bargirlware, ultra tight jeans and a skimpy top. She looks like she is ready for a night out. She looks like a whore.

She signs into MSN Messenger in offline mode. She can see others online but they cannot see her. She starts chatting with a guy and he turns on his webcam. I can tell from the guy’s email address that it is NOT the client. I immediately know that this hussy is up to no good. If she was genuinely keen on my client she would have engaged him in conversation from the outset but she is now asking the usual inane questions to another guy. I know in my mind that she is up to no good and this case is now merely going to be a case of gathering evidence to present to the client.

After a few minutes she goes into online mode and starts up a conversation using microphone and webcam with my client. As she is sat at the terminal right next to me I clearly see everything she and hear everything she says and does. I can see my client in the webcam but cannot hear what he is saying to her as she is wearing headphones. As she is chatting with him other chat windows pop up. Other guys engage her in conversation. Their comments suggest rather more familiarity than mere online pals.

A capable multi-tasker, she opens up Internet Explorer and logs into her email account. I am only half observing as I watch her type in her password. Her finger hovers above one key on the keyboard which she presses about a half dozen times. For sure, her password was made up of just one key. I look across at her email address and make a mental note of it. I am thrilled. Quite unexpectedly we now have the keys to the castle. Things are moving in the right direction.

She goes into her email inbox and with the proximity of our terminals I can clearly see that she has been a busy girl. She appears to receive about 5 emails a day, each from a different guy. Her email inbox reveals heaps of names.

Let’s go back a step. My client has been sponsoring this little hussy for 6 months, sending her a very generous salary, more than the average Bangkok English teacher earns a month. The odd email from a former customer is to be expected, but this level of frequency isn't suspicious, it's incriminating. There's no excuse for it and it is plainly clear that she has remained in contact with many, many guys. Western names. Scandinavian names. Even Middle Eastern names. Busy girl.

And then I notice something. There’s an email to her from a guy I know! Well, I don’t know him as such, but he has a really unusual name. It’s a guy I did a job for many years ago. I mentally file his name away. Small world.

While chatting with her boyfriend, my client, she is also reading email from other guys. I am worried that she might see me peering at her screen but she's so busy both conversing and reading emails in her second language that she doesn’t notice. She opens an email and there’s an email from someone with a decidedly German sounding name. He is due in town next month. She composes a reply while she is chatting with my client, smiling and has completely convinced him of her innocence. She talks about the flowers he recently sent and says they made her loom smell nice.

As they continue chatting she is joined by another girl, clearly a lady of the night, dressed in the usual bargirl garb. This bird looks hard and being quite ugly makes the whole look even worse. The recent arrival places a bag of cosmetics at the terminal which coincides with the client stating that it's time for him to head off to work. They say their goodbyes, close the chat window but she is not done online. She takes time to read emails from other guys and send them replies while applying make up and lipstick. She looks like a hardcore hooker and it's clear I will be on the freelancer venue carousel tonight.

But she is not done online yet. She opens up a chat window with one guy, a late ‘20s looking European. She types some highly flirtatious messages and he has a huge grin on his face. Fortunately he doesn’t suggest webcam sex.

It’s now well after 10:30 PM and the girls settle the bill with the net café owner. I notice that the signs are all in English. The price is 1 baht a minute but they are charged half that. Racism is alive and well in Sukhumvit’s net cafés.

I hurriedly settle mine - at full price - and follow 30 seconds later.

They amble up the road, ever so slowly and I wonder if it is humanly possible for them to walk any slower. I am on the lookout for the nearest motorcycle taxis. I'm not sure which venue the girls are heading for and I know that I might have to use the services of one of the men in orange vests to track them. Fortunately they remain on foot and several minutes later I have eliminated all other venues. They're hitting Gulliver’s. I duck into a shop where I am harangued by the owner to buy some tourist junk. Arriving at the same time would arouse suspicion so I have to kill a little time.

10 minutes later I am in Gulliver's and take up a point across the bar from the two and watch them engaging in conversation with a number of guys. The rest of the night is remarkably uneventful. It is clear that they're up for it but no-one takes them up on their offer and eventually they leave for home. I later learn that they are cousins and share what can only be described as a rathole. But it’s cheap and walking distance to all of the freelance venues. Perfect.

The client had offered to pay for an apartment over and above what he was sending her. You can get decent rooms for 7,000 - 8,000 baht a month with a swimming pool. But a bit further out. This rathole is slap in the farang ghetto, walking distance to any of the freelancer venues, a prime location for her activities. It later transpired that she had taken a number of guys to see her rathole, telling the same story to each customer in an attempt to make them feel sorry for her and help financially. "I am just a poor farmer's daughter with no education. Look how poor I am. Can you help me have a better life? Can you support me? I will be your girlfriend and be faithful to you." Tears followed...

I get home and fire off a report to the customer, but not before I am a naughty boy and try the password for her email account. It doesn’t work! I curse myself. How could it not work? I'm convinced I got it. I try it several times and change the number of keystrokes. It was somewhere between 5 and 9 keystrokes. But it doesn’t work. I include this info to the customer. It is now very, very late and I hit the sack.

In the morning I have a reply from the customer. The password worked. He had got into her account and it was a huge tale of woe. My observation of her behaviour showed that she appeared to be on the game but I had not observed her do anything wrong as such, apart from the fact that she had told her boyfriend that she would not even go to those venues. But the evidence in her email account totally contradicted the observations of my first night of the investigation.

The customer got little work done that day. He spent hours going through her mail account. It was highly incriminating. She had had the account since 2005 and by chance had the save mail setting to on, meaning that every email she had sent in the last 3 years was there!

The client discovered a number of guys sending her money on a monthly basis. But he was the biggest sponsor - and by default the biggest fool. Photos the customer had taken of her had been forwarded to other guys. She had sent some nude photographs of herself to some customers. She had sent graphic emails to some guys of what she would like to do with them. There were salacious emails from a US government employee from his work email address. And then there was the biggest kicker of them all. The customer had left her at the airport some 6 months earlier, both of them with tears in their eyes. She had told him she was broke and he had given her an extremely tidy sum. “I’ll wait for you. I’ll never go to the bars again. I’ll never go with another man until you return” she had promised him. All along, even when they were together on that particular trip, she had been communicating with a European, a man who was to fly in the very next day and she was to spend the next two weeks with!

I couldn’t believe all that he was telling me and I went to have a sneaky look at her email. You didn’t expect me not to, did you?! But the password didn’t work! I couldn’t work it out. It worked for him but it didn’t work for me. I couldn’t understand it.

It turns out that I had caught her password, but her email address, a combination of letters, numbers and an underscore, I had got wrong. The client was shattered. Devastated. They had planned a life together.

Then he had a revelation for me. He revealed that he was divorcing his wife for her. When he told her that he could see her panic. She started making conditions. He had to buy her a condo. He said he would buy a condo, in his name, and she could live there. That was not acceptable. It had to be her name and before the marriage. She insisted on a Thai marriage with a 300,000 baht sin sot. Nothing less. If he could not do these things there would be no marriage. He loved her and was blinded and continued the relationship.

Since leaving her 6 months earlier, he’d been counting down the months to this trip, been sending her a huge amount of money every month and had planned the rest of their lives together. They were going to have kids. They were going to live in the States. Now he discovered that it was all a lie.

The whole case had been solved. Inadvertently discovering her password had revealed the truth behind the smile.

As the customer read through email after email, it just got worse and worse and worse. She had sent out an email to a number of guys saying that she had been robbed and lost her TV, computer and various other items of value. She didn't have money for English school. A number of guys sent money for that. Others were sending her money on a regular basis.

She had received an email from a customer who had had unprotected sex with her and had since found out he was HIV+. The customer told her she needed to get checked. She responded saying that he was a bad man and hoped he would die! She was not concerned at all. She should have been. She admits she never uses a condom unless the guy wants it. She says she insisted they finish outside. Not every guy would. Some of the explicit emails the client read said that the guys didn't manage that. She was OK about it. The guy would end up being another boyfriend sending support.

Amongst the many foreign men keen on her, there was a German who was particularly on her. He was prepared to leave his wife and two kids for her. She didn’t want that to happen. In reading the emails it was clear that she wanted the relationship to remain complicated. That way she would keep getting a monthly stipend but the relationship would not be able to develop to the next level. This is a trick the bargirls play. Guys mistakenly think it is because she doesn’t want to break up a family. That has nothing to do with it. If a guy leaves his wife for a Thai hooker he is going to be in Thailand in no time. He will want the girl to move in with him. He has made a huge sacrifice and will have high expectations of her. She knows that. It restricts her ability to milk other guys so she doesn't allow it to happen. All under the guise of not wanting to break up a marriage.

This girl had been around for a number of years, had very good English and had managed to retain an almost innocent charm that had most guys begging for more. The client couldn't believe what he was reading. He was shattered. His life had been turned upside down. He felt the bitterness of betrayal and the devastation of a relationship breakdown. It wasn’t just the money, the wasted time and hope, but his dreams of a future together. Gone.

The client then decided that he wanted to win her back. He was to arrive in late June but changed his plans to arrive in mid-June, the very same day as another of her customers, that would be the German, the one she was keen on, the one she had sent more lovey dovey emails to than anyone else. The client would surprise her. He would effectively force her to choose. He was sending her far more money than the German, four times as much. He had known her longer. This would eliminate the German from the equation. She would apologise and be all contrite, they would have make up sex and the whole nightmare would be over. He would go to meet her family as they had planned and these nightmarish investigation results would be a thing of the past.

A month later he arrived in town, two weeks earlier than she had expected. He called her and said, “Surprise darling, I am here!”

She couldn’t believe it and she wasn’t happy. She said that she couldn’t meet him now and that she had to go and see her family and that she would see him in two weeks time as they had planned. He then blurted out that he knew everything, knew about the German, knew about other guys and knew that she had stacked the guys’ visits so that they would not clash. She had to make a choice – him or the German.

He really thought she would choose him. But she chose the German. She said that the client was trying to control her by trying to stop her going to the bars and discos. The German was a nice man because he never tried to control her. She likes guys who send her money and let her do her thing without complaint. And she likes older guys who have complicated lives, marriages they can't get out of so they can't take it to the next level. Things remain stuck in support mode forever.

She would be happy to see the client in two weeks. He was in town for a month. He could wait and she would see him then.

The client was devastated and for a few days felt suicidal. He went down to Pattaya, had some fun and tried to get it out of his system.

I met the client on the very last day of his trip. We had a coffee and chatted about the whole ordeal, the past and the future. He revealed to me that he had actually known her for a number of years but it was only the last 6 months that he had been really keen on her and supporting her. She had attempted the “I’m pregnant scam” on him 4 years ago. Her deceit goes back years.

I expected him to have put her in the past, but these girls’ hooks are strong. “I’ve spent 5 days with her on this trip. She stormed out of the room at 7 this morning when I put my hand on her leg. She even smashed things in the hotel room last night, though luckily nothing of value.”

I looked at him surprised. He’d seen her? After all of this, he had seen her?

He had had a sneaky look in her handbag during the night and found scraps of paper with guys' email addresses. These were binned. Her phone was full of guys' names. It was always ringing when he was with her. She was getting SMS text messages from guys based in Bangkok all the time.

On this trip, after everything that had happened, she constantly asked him to pay her bills, take her to the jewelry shop, buy perfume, take her shopping at MBK, pay for her school. All this knowing he had quit his job and was on a tight budget. She was even still talking about him buying her a condo and a car.

She kept asking and asking. He noticed new jewelry on her wrist when the other boyfriend was here. It was gone after the German left. He doubts she has sold it...yet. She will wait until the relationship ends.

She hates the client now. In her mind he is the one at fault. Not her.

Sponsoring girls seldom works. Frankly, it is bad for your well-being. Not just your finances, but your emotional well-being.