Right, well, I suppose I should start with a little background... I lived in Vietnam for 2 years. I recently came back to the UK to work and started looking at the best / easiest way to get my girlfriend to come and live with me in the UK for a few years while I finish what business I have to conclude here at which point we'll both move back to Vietnam. The problem with a UK visitor visa is that although you can get 6 month, 1 year, 2 year etc. visas, the maximum stay on a single visit is 3 months. The next option is a fiance / wife visa...
With applying for a Visa for the UK you usually have to provide "proof" for everything, and if they choose to be, the UK Borders Agency can get really picky about what you do in your application. I therefore thought that getting married BEFORE making the application would make things a bit easier because we would have a marriage certificate as proof we were married, rather than just us saying "we want to get married, no really we do".
I looked in to getting married in Vietnam, but to do this there is a rather long list of requirements, none of which are particularly complex, but the one that makes it nigh on impossible for me personally is that you have to both attend the local marriage office to submit the paperwork, and you both then have to attend the same office around 20-28 days later to sign the marriage certificate.
Now, as I live and work in the UK, taking an entire month off work (however nice an idea it sounds) is not really practical... neither is making 2 trips to the other side of the world in one month. You have to attend the office when they tell you to, you can't take the paper work in on one day and say "can we come back in 2 months"... you take in the paperwork on a particular day, and about one month later they call you and say "come in tomorrow to sign the marriage certificate" and you have to go that day or you have to start the process all over again.
This is when I discovered a website telling me that getting married in thailand is very easy, and more specifically telling me that arranging a marriage between Vietnamese national to other non-thai national is very easy and requires no special documents. More than this, the website claims that the whole wedding can be done in 4 days.
I hate to use the word scam, but that's what is feels like from where I'm sitting.
You may have guessed from my blog title and earlier posts, this website was www.wed-in-thailand.com
run and owned by the same company that run www.thaino1.com
You'll have to check back later for the next installment, the bit where it all goes horribly wrong...
http://dontusethaino1.blog.com/
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