CityNews – 12th March 2020, there has been an unexpected update to the story published earlier this week about a first year student who was sexually harassed and who felt threatened by a Food Panda delivery driver.
Earlier this week, on the 9th March, a post on social media went viral when a girl shared screen captures of a conversation she had with her Food Panda delivery driver. He started off by asking to come up and deliver food to her room, which was odd, she said, as she always came down to the dorm lobby to pick it up. She insisted she would come down, he insisted he could come up. He then asked to use her toilet in her room and she told him politely that there was one down stairs. After trying again, she firmly told him no. He responded with a vulgar word for horny.
Food Panda was alerted to this post and offered her some free vouchers, assuring her that the driver was fired and that this would not happen again.
However, following police investigation, it was discovered that Chatree Burut, 36, who was the Food Panda driver whose name was on the app, was found not to have been the one sending the messages at all.
Chatree came forward to the police to explain that he had once been a Food Panda driver to earn extra money as a part time job. But he had stopped working for the app for three months now because his job as a football coach was demanding. An old friend who still worked at the app had called him following the incident, telling him that his name and ID had been hacked and used in this incident at the dorm.
Chatree said that he was very alarmed and tried to reach out to both the app and the girl, but that he was unable to reach them. Then on the 10th March he received a phone call from the police telling him that they had arrested the man who had stolen his ID. This man, 21, was found at another dorm at Chiang Mai Technical College and has admitted to being the man who texted the student. According to the police, who did not name the man as there had been no official police complaint about him, the 21 year old man was a known sexual deviant who regularly sent such texts to people. Police say that unless someone lodges an official complaint, the matter was final.
Chatree, on hearting this, went to the police station yesterday to officially press charges as his name has been damaged by this incident. He urges both the Food Panda app and the young student to press charges too, but has yet to hear from them.
It is unclear why Food Panda made an announcement following the incident that they had fired the driver, when clearly they hadn’t as there was no driver. It is also unclear how and why the police tracked down the 21 year old if there was no official crime lodged at that time. There are many other questions to this matter and we will see if we can find some answers.