Thai bride marries for love ... of money, authorities say

From the Thai media comes the story of a sultry young woman who, over the course of about two years, convinced at least 11 different men to marry her.

Following Thai tradition, each man gave her a generous sum of money, a dowry, at which point she disappeared, the men told police.

From each husband, she collected between $6,000 and $30,000 before vanishing, using various excuses such as she had to return to her family’s home to deal with their fruit business or her horoscope advised her that it just wasn’t a good time to be married.

So convincing was this woman that she married four times in August alone, police told media.

Not until a warning about her was posted on Facebook did any of the men go to authorities.

How the warning got to Facebook has not been revealed. Perhaps it was posted by one of the grooms, of whom there may be more, reports state.

Upon seeing the Facebook post, they descended on police, according to The Bangkok Post and other Thai media, and told the stories of how they had allegedly been duped.

According to the English lan- guage paper The Nation, quoting a lawyer for the men, the method was the same in each case.

She would friend the man on Facebook, meet him, have sex with him, marry him and then take the money and run.

She is being called “the runaway bride.”

Pirat Puengsuk, 28, claims to have lost some $30,000, the dowry plus a Toyota pickup truck. He told police he quit his job as a transport driver and married her after a two-month whirlwind Facebook courtship, thinking he would join her and her parents in the fruit business.

“She demanded that I marry her before investing in the business together because it was her family’s tradition. If we weren’t married, we couldn’t do business together,” said Pirat, as quoted in The Nation. She then vanished in his pickup. As it turned out, a warrant for fraud was already out on the woman stemming from an apparently unrelated incident. After the men went to police as a group, The Bangkok Post reported, police caught up with her in Thailand’s Nakhon Pathom Province, known for its fruit orchards.

Police last week arrested Jariyaporn Buayai, 32, and a man police described as her real husband.