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The Securities and Exchange Commission of Thailand (SEC) has come under scrutiny once again after a ‘Ghost’ investor has appeared to have just over 7% equity interest in True Corporation Plc (TRUE) which puts the investment to the tune of 32.50 billion Baht.
The story came to light after TRUE asked the SEC to verify a Form 246-2 filing that appeared to show Supaporn Phimpong acquiring a major stake in the telecom giant through UBS Group AG, turning what began as a mystery-shareholder story into a wider test of Thailand’s market-disclosure system.
The filing, published in a Stock Exchange of Thailand summary of SEC Form 246-2 reports, stated that Supaporn acquired TRUE shares on June 15, 2026, equivalent to 3.2174% of total voting rights, raising her holding to 7.0992%.
Such a stake, if confirmed, would immediately place the name among TRUE’s major shareholders and make the transaction one of the most closely watched shareholding moves in the Thai capital market.
Supaporn’s 7.1% stake in TRUE comes to 32.50 billion Baht (TRUE’s Market Capitalization is at 456.088 billion Baht).
The case took a new turn after TRUE reportedly sent a clarification letter to securities firms and institutional investors, saying it had doubts over whether the transaction actually occurred as reported or whether the filing contained inaccurate information. The company said the matter had been escalated to the SEC for review in order to clarify the facts for investors.
TRUE Denies’ Preferred Shares’
To make matters worse, Suphaporn’s declaration states that he/she has ‘Preferred Shares’ in TRUE, a notion that the firm came out to deny saying that it has no ‘Preferred Shares’ outstanding in the market.
The investigative team discovered that the official form explicitly logged the acquisition of millions of “preferred shares.”
However, TRUE Corporation immediately issued an emergency disclosure to the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET), stating that it possesses absolutely no preferred shares in its capital structure, confirming that the SEC-approved document was entirely falsified.
Ghost Investor – Suphaporn
The issue took a new turn when local Thai language Khao Hoon undertook an investigation and found out that the same Suphaporn had in the past few years acquired stakes in various other companies to beyond the 5% mandatory filing requirement.
Under Thai SEC rules, anyone acquiring or disposing shares beyond the 5% must report their acquisition or disposal of every share above the 5% of the listed shares of the firm.
In the past few years Suphaporn has purchased a few shares beyond the 5% mandatory limit of declaring but none of the disposals of these shares were ever reported.
Although the SEC filings have Suphaporn holding 5.1% of shares of the 552 billion Baht market capitalized stock (equivalent to 28.21 billion Baht), the shareholding list on the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) does not show Suphaporn’s name (https://www.set.or.th/en/market/product/stock/quote/KBANK/major-shareholders), a similar check on other stocks held that are listed in the infographic above does not show Suphaporn’s name or shareholdings. Neither was there ever a filing to dispose those assets that Suphaporn had reportedly purchased.
Questions are being raised whether it is a security failure or something more sinister such as hacking or grey money. This has triggered an emergency investigation into whether the regulator’s backend database has been compromised by hackers or suffers from critical validation loopholes.
Further cross-referencing by Kao Hoon revealed that this was part of years-long pattern of undetected, phantom filings. Since 2018, the exact same identity successfully logged massive ownership positions on the SEC portal in several of Thailand’s largest blue-chip companies, including a staggering 49% stake in GJS Steel, and over 5% positions in Bangkok Bank (BBL), Kasikornbank (KBANK), and Asia Aviation (AAV).
Actual shareholder registries at these institutions confirm that the individual does not own a single share, despite the SEC system issuing valid reference tracking numbers for each transaction.
The incident has shifted the focus of the Thai financial sector away from corporate identity fraud and directly toward a major cybersecurity and structural crisis at the SEC. Under market protocols, filing a Form 246-2 requires an encrypted user registration, identity verification against national databases, and validation of underlying assets through an accredited brokerage—in this instance, allegedly via UBS.
Market analysts warn that the capability of a phantom investor to bypass these gatekeeping protocols and broadcast false data directly through the regulator’s portal severely undermines the integrity of public financial disclosures.
As the SEC and the SET scramble to review their data infrastructure, the market is left demanding immediate clarification on how a critical public gateway could be exploited to manipulate investor sentiment.
