Filing a police report in Bangkok: two numbers, and only one starts a case

People walk out of Thai police stations holding a piece of paper and assume a case has begun. Often one has not. The Royal Thai Police run two separate numbering systems — one for the fact that you came in and said something, one for a criminal case — and the paper looks much the same either way. Here is what the Criminal Procedure Code requires, what the police’s own published guidance says they may and may not do, and the one deadline that catches foreigners more than any other.

Compiled by the Town Wire News desk · Last verified October 2026 · How we made this

Two numbers, two books

Start with the thing nobody tells you, because it explains most of the disappointment that follows.

A Royal Thai Police regulation of 28 September 2022, on the issuing of report numbers and criminal case numbers, defines the vocabulary that station desks work to. A report is the account of events that a person gives to the officer receiving it, alleging that an offence has occurred. The report number is the sequence number for receiving that account. A criminal case number is something else: it is the sequence number for receiving a complaint or an accusation, issued when investigation shows there is a prima facie criminal offence. The regulation names the books they live in — a report book and a case book — and provides for both to exist in whatever information system the Royal Thai Police prescribe.

So the desk can produce paper in more than one way, and from the outside the paper is similar: Thai script, a stamp, a number, a signature. What differs is which register the number came out of, and therefore whether anything is now required to happen.

There is a third book as well. The guidance Bangkok stations publish on receiving reports directs that where someone comes in about something that is not a criminal case, and wants it recorded as evidence to confirm, certify or verify something, the officer records it in the daily report book — and that a report of a lost document is recorded in the separate daily book for lost documents. That is the record most travellers actually need when a passport or a driving licence has gone, and it is a perfectly proper thing to ask for. It is simply not a case.

What a complaint legally is, and the word that is missing from most of them

Section 2(7) of the Criminal Procedure Code defines a complaint as an accusation made to an official by the injured person, that an offence has been committed causing damage to them — whether or not the offender is known — made with the intention that the offender be punished.

That last clause is not decorative. The police guidance on this treats it as the condition on which everything else turns: an accusation made without that intention is not a lawful complaint, and without a lawful complaint the inquiry official has no power to investigate the offence. So the difference between a story and a complaint is, in part, a sentence you have to say.

Section 2(8) covers the other case: where the person making the accusation is not the injured person, what they make is an accusation rather than a complaint. And section 2(4) defines the injured person as the person harmed by the offence, together with those entitled to act on their behalf under sections 4, 5 and 6 — the legal representative of a minor, the guardian of an incapacitated person, and the ascendants, descendants and spouse of someone killed or so injured that they cannot act.

Section 123 then says what a complaint has to contain and how it is made. It must show the complainant’s name and address, the nature of the offence, the circumstances in which it was committed, the damage suffered, and the name or description of the offender as far as that can be given. It may be in writing or spoken. If written, it must carry the date and the complainant’s signature. If spoken, the inquiry official records it, dates it, and both the official and the complainant sign the record. That last requirement is your leverage: a spoken complaint that has been properly taken produces a signed document with your name on it, and you are entitled to know what you signed.

Section 124 widens the door. A complaint need not be made to an inquiry official: it may be made to an administrative or police officer holding a position senior or junior to the inquiry official, whose duty is the keeping of public order, who then passes it on. In practice this is the provision behind an officer at a post or a checkpoint being able to take something from you at all.

Why the wording decides whether anything can happen

Thai criminal offences fall into two families, and the division matters more here than anywhere else in this guide.

An offence against the state cannot be compromised. An offence against the person — a compoundable offence — can be settled between the parties, and the law treats the injured person as holding the key to it.

Section 121 puts that into procedure: an inquiry official has power to investigate all criminal cases, but in a compoundable offence is forbidden to investigate unless a complaint has been made in accordance with the rules. And section 120 provides that the public prosecutor may not bring a case to court unless there has been an investigation. Chain the two together and the consequence, which the police guidance spells out, is severe: in a compoundable case, if there was no lawful complaint or the complaint was defective, the investigation was conducted without power, the prosecutor has no power to charge, and when that surfaces the court dismisses.

Which is why an inquiry official may sound pedantic about the words used and about your signature. In a compoundable case, the paperwork is the jurisdiction.

The three-month clock

Now the deadline. Section 96 of the Penal Code: in the case of a compoundable offence, if the injured person does not complain within three months from the day of learning of the offence and learning who committed it, the case is time-barred.

Three months is short, and the trigger is not the offence. It is your knowledge of it and of the person — so the clock typically starts on the day the picture becomes clear, which in a fraud is often weeks after the money moved.

The general prescription in section 95 works quite differently: it runs from the date of the offence and is measured in years by the size of the penalty, from one year at the bottom to twenty at the top. It applies to everything. But for compoundable offences, section 96 stacks a much tighter requirement on top of it.

Two consequences are worth holding on to, because they are the opposite of what intuition suggests.

The lighter offence has the tighter deadline. Someone who took your bag has committed a state offence with no three-month clock on it. Someone who talked you out of your money has committed a compoundable one that expires three months after you work out who they were.

The heavier offence cannot be called off. The police guidance is explicit that in a case that cannot be compromised, once the injured person has complained, the matter cannot be settled and the complaint cannot be withdrawn: the officials must take it forward whether or not the injured person still wants them to. If what you actually want is your property back and an apology, that is worth knowing before you complain rather than after.

“It did not happen in our area”

This is the single most common experience foreigners describe, and it is the one the police’s own guidance addresses most directly.

Bangkok metropolitan stations publish, as part of their transparency disclosures, a document on the exercise of discretion in not accepting a criminal complaint. Its first substantive instruction is about receiving reports at all: receiving reports is a service to the public, and officers on duty are to assist and advise promptly, with evasion, neglect and shifting responsibility prohibited. It then turns to criminal matters and directs that every inquiry official bear in mind that an injured person may complain and an accuser may accuse, and that the inquiry official has a legal duty to receive the complaint or accusation whether or not the offence occurred, is alleged to have occurred, or is believed to have occurred within their own jurisdiction — and it is prohibited to refuse on the ground that the offence did not occur in their area.

What follows differs by where it happened, and the difference is in what the station does next rather than in whether they take it:

• In their area. Receive the complaint under the rules, record the details in the register for general criminal proceedings — or the land-traffic register — whether or not the matter can be compounded on the day, log it in the daily case report, and begin investigating without delay.
• Not in their area, or outside the Kingdom. Receive the report and log it in the daily case report, then send the matter on to the inquiry official for the responsible locality.
• Unclear where it happened. Follow section 19 of the Criminal Procedure Code; and where it is unclear which of several inquiry officials within a province or across provinces has authority, follow section 21, with the receiving official conducting a preliminary investigation and referring the question upward.

None of that guarantees an outcome. What it does is remove “go to the station in the district where it happened” from the list of things you have to accept at the desk.

When they may decline — and the 48 hours above the desk

Section 122 of the Criminal Procedure Code names three situations in which an inquiry official may decline to investigate, and they are narrow:

1. where the injured person asks for assistance but will not complain in accordance with the rules;
2. where the injured person has already brought their own prosecution without having complained first;
3. where the accusation is an anonymous letter, or the person accusing orally will not say who they are or will not sign the accusation or the record of it.

Separately from those, there is the everyday disagreement: the desk thinks your problem is a civil one. The published guidance sets out a route for that, and the route has a clock on it. Where the official has taken statements from the reporter and the witnesses and gathered what evidence can be gathered, and it is clear that there is no prima facie criminal offence, the matter is to be put up the chain to the head of the unit with investigative authority, who is to decide within forty-eight hours of the report number being issued. If the decision is that the matter is civil, the guidance requires that it be explained to the reporter so that they understand, that it be entered in the daily case record, and that the reporter sign it as evidence.

And then the sentence worth carrying in your pocket: if the reporter does not agree with that decision and confirms that they want the inquiry official to investigate, the officials are to proceed as the reporter wishes — while explaining the legal responsibility the reporter may incur. That last clause is a real warning, not a formality: making a false complaint has its own consequences. But the structure is clear. A “this is civil” at the counter is a decision that can be escalated and, if you insist, does not end the matter.

The reason the guidance exists at all is stated in its own preamble, and it is unusually frank. It records that injured persons who go to complain may be met with a discretionary refusal; that the police have a regulation on complaints and accusations, No. 9 of B.E. 2542, which is written so as not to leave room for such discretion; and that where the complaint is lawful, an official who refuses to receive it commits an offence under section 157 of the Penal Code — malfeasance by an official who performs or omits a duty wrongfully so as to cause damage, punishable by one to ten years’ imprisonment or a fine of 2,000 to 20,000 baht, or both — as well as a disciplinary breach. It then lists the reasons this happens anyway: too few inquiry officials for the workload, honest difficulty in telling a civil matter from a criminal one, officers rotated in from other duties without investigative experience, and interference from above in the exercise of discretion.

Language, and who is really translating

Section 13 of the Criminal Procedure Code requires investigations, preliminary hearings and trials to be conducted in Thai, with an interpreter used where something must be translated between Thai and another language or a local dialect. It then puts an obligation on the state: where the injured person, the accused, the defendant or a witness cannot speak or understand Thai, or understands only a local language, and there is no interpreter, the inquiry official, the public prosecutor or the court shall provide an interpreter without delay.

Bangkok stations list this among the rights of an injured person in their own published rights sheets — the right to be provided with an interpreter or a sign-language interpreter, cited to section 13. The same sheets list twelve other rights, several of which foreigners are rarely told about: the right to complain and to withdraw a complaint (sections 3, 124, 126); the right to prosecute privately and to withdraw that prosecution (sections 3, 35); the right to join the public prosecutor as a co-plaintiff (section 30); the right to compound in an offence against the person (section 35); the right to refuse a question that might, directly or indirectly, expose the injured person as a witness to criminal charge (section 234); and the right of an injured person to decide whether to consent to a physical examination, with a female injured person entitled to be examined by a female officer.

The practical trap is the informal fix. A friend who speaks some Thai, or an officer who speaks some English, produces an account that is then written down in Thai and signed by you. What is on the record afterwards is the Thai text. If the wording matters — and in a compoundable offence, as above, the wording is the jurisdiction — the interpreter provision is there to be used.

Getting compensated without bringing a second case

One provision deserves to be better known than it is. Section 41/1 of the Criminal Procedure Code allows an injured person to file an application, in the criminal case brought by the public prosecutor, asking the court to order the defendant to pay compensation. It is not a separate civil action with its own filing and its own timetable; it rides on the prosecution.

The police rights sheets set out what follows procedurally. Once such an application has been filed, the court of first instance sends notice of the date for delivering judgment to the injured person as well. And if the court dismisses the criminal charge, or awards less compensation than was applied for, the injured person is to be informed of the right to appeal in respect of the civil part of the application.

If the money left a bank account

One category of loss has its own machinery and does not belong at an ordinary counter. Where money has been moved out of a Thai bank account by deception, Thailand’s technology-crime decree creates a separate route with its own hotline, its own suspension powers and its own tight deadline, and the report made through it is treated as a complaint in its own right. We have written that up separately, because the clocks and the phone numbers are different and getting them in the wrong order is what costs people the money: see scams, transfers and frozen bank accounts.

For everything else — a snatched phone, a burgled condominium, a landlord who has kept a deposit and will not answer, an assault, a lost passport — the ordinary station is the right door, and the two-number question at the top of this page is the right first move.

The numbers, and what each one actually is

191 is the general police emergency number. 1155 is the Tourist Police Bureau, which runs a round-the-clock line with multilingual assistance and publishes an app offering live chat with officers in several languages, incident reporting with translation, and a station locator. Both are useful, and neither is a substitute for the thing that starts a case.

Keep the distinction clear in your head: a hotline connects you to help. A complaint is a thing received by an inquiry official — or, under section 124, by an administrative or police officer above or below that official whose duty is keeping public order — and recorded, dated and signed. When the two happen in the same conversation, good. When they do not, the second one still has to happen.

What actually goes wrong

Taking the wrong paper and finding out months later. A daily record is a real record and is exactly what an insurer or an embassy usually wants. It is not a case, and no one at the counter is obliged to volunteer the difference.

Missing three months. The clock on fraud, embezzlement and defamation is the shortest deadline in this whole area, and it starts when you know who did it — which is usually the moment you stop hoping the money will come back on its own.

Complaining before deciding what you want. In a state offence, complaining commits you: the guidance says the matter cannot then be settled or withdrawn. In a compoundable one, you keep the key.

Accepting a jurisdiction refusal. The published guidance forbids it in terms. If it happens anyway, the escalation route above the desk is the head of the investigating unit, and it has a forty-eight-hour clock on it.

Signing Thai text you have not had translated. The record is the Thai text, and section 13 exists precisely so that you do not have to guess.

Leaving without the number. Whatever kind of report it was, write down the number, the station, the date and the name of the officer who took it. Everything afterwards — an insurer, an embassy, a follow-up, a lawyer — begins by asking for those four things.

Questions people actually ask

What is the difference between a daily record and a police report in Thailand?

They are different books with different numbers. Under the Royal Thai Police regulation of 28 September 2022 on the issuing of report numbers and criminal case numbers, a report number records that somebody came in and said something happened. A criminal case number is issued when the receiving of a complaint or an accusation is followed by an investigation showing there is a prima facie criminal offence. A person who only wants something written down for confirmation purposes — a lost document, for instance — is recorded in the daily report book, and a lost document goes in its own separate daily book. Both are real records and both can be given to you on paper. Only one of them is a case.

What makes a police report a legal complaint in Thailand?

The definition is in section 2(7) of the Criminal Procedure Code, and it has an element people do not expect. A complaint is an accusation made to an official by the injured person that an offence has been committed causing them damage — whether or not the offender is known — made with the intention that the offender be punished. If that intention is absent, what you made is not a complaint in law. Section 123 then sets out what it must contain: your name and address, the nature of the offence, the circumstances, the damage, and the name or description of the offender so far as you can give it. It may be written or spoken; if written it must be dated and signed, and if spoken the inquiry official records it, dates it, and both of you sign the record.

Is there a deadline for reporting a crime in Thailand?

For one class of offence, yes, and it is short. Section 96 of the Penal Code provides that in a compoundable offence, if the injured person does not complain within three months from the day of learning of the offence and learning who committed it, prescription lapses. Fraud, embezzlement and defamation are all compoundable, so all three carry that three-month clock. Theft is not compoundable, and so is governed only by the general periods in section 95, which run from the date of the offence rather than from your discovery of it. The counter-intuitive result is that the lighter offence often has the tighter deadline.

Can a Thai police station refuse a report because the crime happened in another district?

The guidance the police publish about their own conduct says no. In the transparency documents that Bangkok metropolitan stations publish on receiving reports, inquiry officials are directed to bear in mind that an injured person may complain and an accuser may accuse, and that the official has a duty to receive the complaint or accusation whether or not the offence occurred, is alleged to have occurred, or is believed to have occurred within their own jurisdiction — and that refusing on the ground that it did not happen in their area is prohibited. Where it happened elsewhere, or outside the Kingdom, the direction is to take the report, log it in the daily case report, and forward the matter to the station responsible.

Can the police decline to investigate?

In three situations named in section 122 of the Criminal Procedure Code: where the injured person asks for help but will not complain in accordance with the rules; where the injured person has already brought their own case in court without complaining first; and where the accusation is anonymous, or the person accusing orally will not say who they are or sign the record. Separately, where the investigation shows there is no prima facie criminal offence, the police guidance requires the matter to go to the head of the investigating unit, who decides within forty-eight hours of the report number being issued; if the decision is that the matter is civil, that must be explained to the reporter and recorded with their signature. And the same guidance says that if the reporter disagrees and insists on an investigation, the officials are to proceed as the reporter wishes.

Do I get an interpreter at a Thai police station?

Section 13 of the Criminal Procedure Code requires investigations, preliminary hearings and trials to be conducted in Thai, provides for an interpreter where translation is needed, and states that where an injured person, an accused, a defendant or a witness cannot speak or understand Thai and there is no interpreter, the inquiry official, the public prosecutor or the court shall provide one without delay. Bangkok stations list it among an injured person’s rights in their own published rights sheets, as the right to be provided with an interpreter or a sign-language interpreter.

Can I get compensation without hiring a lawyer for a separate case?

Section 41/1 of the Criminal Procedure Code lets an injured person file an application in the criminal case brought by the public prosecutor asking the court to order the defendant to pay compensation. The police rights sheets note the procedural consequences: once such an application is filed, the court of first instance sends notice of the judgment date to the injured person as well, and if the criminal charge is dismissed or the compensation awarded is less than was claimed, the injured person is to be informed of the right to appeal on the civil part.

Can I withdraw a police report in Thailand?

Only in a compoundable offence. Withdrawing a complaint is listed in the police rights sheets as a right of the injured person, alongside the right to settle in offences against the person, citing sections 3, 124 and 126. But in an offence against the state — murder, robbery, gang-robbery are the examples the police guidance gives — the guidance is explicit that once the injured person has complained, the matter cannot be settled or the complaint withdrawn, and the officials must carry the case forward whether or not the injured person still wants them to.

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