Thai YouTuber involved in $78 million scam detained in Riau after she failed to sing Indonesian national anthem

The once-aspiring K-pop star, who was wanted in Thailand for fraud, was apparently eventually killed by her singing: she was exposed and arrested after she failed to sing the Indonesian national anthem.

Nattamon Hongchak, 31, a YouTube content creator known as “Nutty,” was arrested in Indonesia on Oct. 18 and extradited along with her mother Tania to Thailand on Oct. 25, according to Indonesian media reports.

Investigators in Indonesia said she tried to pass herself off as Indonesian in the town of Dumai in Riau province on the island of Sumatra.

But immigration agents noticed her Thai accent and asked her to sing the Indonesian national anthem, according to a report in the South China Morning Post. When she couldn’t, she and her mother were arrested for illegal entry.

Nattamon, her mother and secretary Nichapat Rattanukrom have been on the run since July 2023.

They left Thailand and headed to Kuala Lumpur before boarding a ship that took them to Indonesia.

Nihafat remains at large.

Nattamon, who also uses the aliases Lia and Suchata, was accused of defrauding thousands of her online followers out of two billion baht (S$78 million) in a foreign exchange trading scam.

From YouTube star to “scammer”

Nattamon has attracted more than 800,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel Nutty’s Diary.

She aspired to become a K-pop celebrity, going so far as to make a brief debut in South Korea under the label Dream Cinema in 2015.

She launched her own skincare brand that same year, but has since sold the factory, according to media reports.

Local media reported that she was born into a wealthy family in Chiang Mai that was involved in karaoke and nightlife. But fate changed, and the family declared bankruptcy.

After living with her mother in Malaysia for some time, she returned to Thailand, where she caused a stir on social networking site Socialcam with her dancing and singing, mostly of popular K-pop songs.

She was also often praised for being a filial daughter who had a close relationship with her mother, who appeared on her YouTube channel.

Capitalizing on her popularity and image, she presented herself as an investment guru in 2022, promising high returns to more than 6,000 people, many of whom later reported receiving no payouts at all.

She invited her followers to deposit money into her account, promising returns of 25 percent for three-month contracts, 30 percent for six months and 35 percent for 12 months. She promised to pay them profits every month.

She boasted that she had 14 cars and 22 nannies.

Colonel Wissanu Chimtrakul, deputy director general of Thailand’s Department of Special Investigations, told reporters that Natthamon’s assets worth about 16 million baht had been seized and that investigators were looking for more assets that could still be confiscated.