Jamaica C5 Form: The Free Form Scammers Charge $100 For
Thailand TDAC: The Free Arrival Card Scammers Charge $90 For
Thailand’s Thailand Digital Arrival Card (TDAC) is free. It takes five minutes, it’s required for all foreign nationals entering Thailand within three days before arrival, and the official portal charges exactly nothing. Thai Immigration Bureau estimated in a March 2026 advisory that scam operations running fraudulent TDAC websites could net up to $100 million — 3 billion baht — from visitors who land on the wrong portal. The same advisory put the penetration rate at 10% of all foreign arrivals having registered through fraudulent sites.
Not 1 in 100. One in ten.
The US Embassy in Bangkok published a notice confirming the TDAC requirement ahead of the May 2025 launch. Thai Immigration Bureau’s March 2026 advisory flagged multiple fake portals — among them tdac.info, ivisa.com, and thailandarrivalcardtourist.com — all charging $20 to $90 for a form the Thai government provides at no cost.
Americans can currently visit Thailand visa-free for up to 60 days — though a Cabinet resolution approved May 19, 2026 will reduce that to 30 days once published in the Royal Gazette, expected around early June 2026. That ease of entry creates the same blind spot it creates everywhere: no visa to apply for, so travelers assume there’s no paperwork. There is. The TDAC sits entirely separate from the visa question. It’s a mandatory pre-arrival registration that covers every foreign national entering Thailand, regardless of how they’re arriving or how long they’re staying.
Quick Facts — Thailand TDAC 2026
Detail Info Who needs it All foreign nationals entering Thailand by air, land, or sea Americans Visa-free up to 60 days as of May 2026 (reducing to 30 days ~early June 2026); TDAC still required Submission window Within 3 days (72 hours) before arrival Required for Air, land, and sea arrivals Cost Free Official portal tdac.immigration.go.th Processing time ~5 minutes Scam sites tdac.info, ivisa.com, thailandarrivalcardtourist.com (among others) Scam site charges $20–$90 Scale of scam 10% of all foreign arrivals; estimated $100M in fraudulent charges Does this replace a visa? No — Americans are currently visa-free for up to 60 days (reducing to ~30 days early June 2026); TDAC is a separate requirement In one sentence: Thailand’s TDAC is a free, mandatory pre-arrival form required within 3 days before entering Thailand by any route — the official portal is tdac.immigration.go.th, and any site charging for it is unauthorized.
What Is the TDAC?
The Thailand Digital Arrival Card is Thailand’s digital replacement for the paper TM.6 form that travelers used to fill out on the plane. It launched May 1, 2025, and is now required for all foreign nationals arriving in Thailand by air, land, or sea.
The form collects what the old TM.6 collected: passport details, travel information, your accommodation address in Thailand, basic trip context. What changed is when and where you fill it out. Instead of scrambling with a paper card while the flight descends into Suvarnabhumi, you complete the TDAC digitally, from home, up to three days before arrival.
Airlines check TDAC completion before you board. Land crossing officers require it. Port immigration requires it. Thai authorities built the system to move data collection earlier in the travel chain — gather information before departure, where there’s still time to act on it.
The 3-Day Window
Submit within three days (72 hours) before your scheduled arrival time. Too early — more than 72 hours out — and the system may not process correctly. Too late and you’re at the border with a problem.
The practical approach: complete it the evening before you travel, once your plans are locked. For most travelers flying into Bangkok, Phuket, or Chiang Mai, that’s the night before your departing flight. For land crossings — entering from Malaysia at Sadao, or from Laos at Nong Khai — same rule: within 72 hours before crossing.
The TDAC is arrival-only. You fill it out before entering Thailand. No corresponding departure form when you leave.
Why the Scale Here Is Different
Every arrival-card scam in this series follows the same pattern: search for the form, find a convincing third-party site, pay, get something that may or may not work. Fake portals have circled Malaysia’s MDAC, Singapore’s SGAC, Vietnam’s digital arrival card, and the Philippines’ eTravel system since each launched.
The TDAC scam is operating at a scale none of those reach.
Thai Immigration Bureau’s March 2026 warning put the number at 10% of all foreign arrivals having registered through fraudulent sites. Thailand welcomed roughly 35 million international visitors in 2024. At 10% penetration, that’s millions of travelers hitting the wrong portal every year — not a niche problem that catches a handful of unprepared first-timers. A meaningful fraction of everyone who visits Thailand.
The $100 million estimate (3 billion baht) is what Thai Immigration calculated fraudulent TDAC services could generate from those visitors. At even the low end of the scam price range — $20 per person — the math at millions of travelers adds up fast. At $90 per person, it adds up faster.
The reason the TDAC scam scales this way is partly timing. The system launched May 1, 2025. Fake portals had twelve months to build search visibility and rank alongside the official site before Thai Immigration issued the March 2026 warning. Twelve months of travelers searching “Thailand arrival card” and finding tdac.info or ivisa.com before they found tdac.immigration.go.th.
The Scam Sites
Search “Thailand TDAC apply” or “Thailand arrival card 2026” and the results have a structural problem.
tdac.info uses the recognizable “tdac” prefix but with a .info commercial TLD — not a government domain. It looks plausible at a glance because of the prefix. It is not a Thai government site.
ivisa.com is a commercial visa services platform. The .com extension and absence of government domain structure are immediate tells. Sites processing Thai immigration documents on commercial domains are not official — and ivisa.com charges for completing a form that’s free on the government portal.
thailandarrivalcardtourist.com assembles recognizable terms from the official form’s name — Thailand, arrival card, tourist — in a way designed to capture search traffic. It is not affiliated with Thai Immigration in any way.
All charge $20 to $90 for the TDAC. Thai Examiner reported these among the portals flagged in Thai Immigration Bureau’s March 2026 advisory, which warned that scam sites had reached 10% penetration of all foreign arrivals.
The tell — the same one that applies to the Colombia Check-MIG scam sites and every other fraudulent arrival-card portal — is the domain. Thai government services live on the .go.th domain. Thai Immigration specifically is at immigration.go.th. The official TDAC portal is tdac.immigration.go.th. Any URL that doesn’t include .go.th is not a Thai government service, regardless of what else the URL says.
How Do I Complete the Thailand TDAC?
The Thailand Digital Arrival Card is completed at tdac.immigration.go.th — the only official portal. The process takes approximately 5 minutes. No account creation required. No fee charged at any step. If a payment screen appears, close the tab.
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Go to tdac.immigration.go.th. Verify the full URL includes immigration.go.th. That is the official Thai Immigration domain. This is the only valid portal.
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Select your entry type. Air, land border, or sea port. The form adjusts based on your method of entry.
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Enter your passport details. Full name exactly as it appears on your passport, passport number, nationality, date of birth, expiry date. Discrepancies between the TDAC and your travel document cause delays at the border.
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Enter your travel information. For air arrivals: airline, flight number, departure date and time, departure airport. For land crossings: planned crossing point and arrival date. For sea arrivals: vessel information and planned entry port.
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Enter your accommodation in Thailand. Hotel name and address, or the address of wherever you’re staying for your first night. For travelers with a multi-city itinerary, the first night’s address is sufficient.
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Complete the health and travel declaration. Short and factual — purpose of visit, any relevant health information requested by the system.
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Submit. No payment screen. No fee. The portal generates a QR code confirmation. Save it somewhere you can pull it up offline — email it to yourself and screenshot it. Airlines and border officers will ask to see it.
Who Needs to Submit
All foreign nationals entering Thailand must complete the TDAC. This covers:
- All foreign visitors arriving by air at any Thai airport
- All foreign visitors entering by land at any border crossing
- All foreign visitors arriving by sea or ferry
- Transit passengers who clear Thai immigration (verify with your airline for airside transits that don’t clear immigration)
US citizens are currently visa-free for 60 days under Thailand’s Tourist Visa Exemption (a Cabinet resolution approved May 19, 2026 will reduce this to 30 days once published in the Royal Gazette, expected ~early June 2026). The TDAC is a separate requirement from that arrangement — not needing a visa doesn’t mean no pre-arrival form. For American travelers, the full picture is: no visa appointment, no border fee, five minutes of TDAC paperwork completed before leaving home.
Children traveling on their own passports each require a separate TDAC submission.
What the TDAC Doesn’t Do
The TDAC is not a visa and doesn’t grant entry to Thailand. Thai immigration officers make entry decisions at the border. What the TDAC does is put your travel data in the system before you arrive — it’s a pre-registration requirement, not a permission slip.
Completing it also doesn’t extend your visa-free period. Americans currently get 60 days on arrival under the Tourist Visa Exemption (reducing to 30 days approximately early June 2026). If you need longer, a Tourist Visa from a Thai embassy or a visa extension through Thai Immigration is the relevant process — separate from the TDAC entirely.
The Thailand departure tax — the 1,120-baht international departure tax that increased 50% effective June 20, 2026 — is also a different system. The departure tax is embedded in airline ticket pricing. The TDAC is a pre-arrival registration. Two separate things, both worth knowing before you travel.
Thailand in the 2026 Pre-Arrival Picture
The TDAC fits a pattern building across Southeast Asia since 2024. Malaysia launched the MDAC. Singapore enforced carrier liability for its SGAC from January 30, 2026. Vietnam’s digital arrival card launched April 15, 2026, and scam sites appeared within weeks. The Philippines’ eTravel system has been active for years and still draws fake portals charging triple digits.
What separates Thailand is the 12-month head start scam sites had before authorities issued a public warning. The TDAC launched in May 2025. By March 2026 — when Thai Immigration confirmed the 10% penetration figure — fraudulent portals had had most of a year to build credibility and search rankings. That timeline is visible in the $100 million projected harm figure: this is what sustained, well-ranked scam operations do when the government’s own site doesn’t rank well enough for its product’s name.
The countries where arrival-card scams cause the most harm are the ones where searching the form’s name returns a fake site before the official one. When “TDAC Thailand” returns tdacimmigration.com above tdac.immigration.go.th, the scam has a structural advantage that has nothing to do with how official it looks.
The solution is the same across every country in this series: don’t trust search results to navigate you to a government form. Go directly. For Thailand, that URL is tdac.immigration.go.th. Bookmark it, type it directly, don’t click your way there from a search results page.
The Bottom Line
Thailand’s TDAC is required for all foreign nationals entering Thailand by air, land, or sea, within three days before arrival. It’s free at the official portal. Americans visiting for up to 60 days need no visa (note: this reduces to 30 days in approximately early June 2026) — but they do need the TDAC.
Thai Immigration Bureau warned in March 2026 that 10% of all foreign arrivals had registered through fraudulent sites — the largest documented penetration rate of any arrival-card scam in this series. Scam operations at sites including tdac.info, ivisa.com, and thailandarrivalcardtourist.com charge $20 to $90 for the form. Thai Immigration estimates these operations could total $100 million from visitors who simply didn’t know where to look.
Go to tdac.immigration.go.th. Five minutes. No payment screen. Done.
TDAC official portal: tdac.immigration.go.th. Thai Immigration Bureau main site: immigration.go.th. US Embassy Bangkok TDAC launch notice: th.usembassy.gov. Scam sites flagged in Thai Immigration Bureau’s March 2026 advisory (via Thai Examiner): tdac.info, ivisa.com, thailandarrivalcardtourist.com, and others. Information current as of May 2026 — verify entry requirements with Thai Immigration before travel.
