Every year a steady stream of fighters, amateurs and weekend hobbyists books a month or three in a Thai gym. Some are preparing for a bout. Most are not — they go for the training volume, the coaching, and the fact that a month of twice-daily sessions can cost less than a year of gym membership at home. It has become one of the more reliable rites of passage in combat sports.
The scale is larger than most people assume. Thailand counted 450 Muay Thai gyms in 2024, 164 of them in Bangkok and 51 in Chiang Mai. The government has also introduced a dedicated 90-day Muay Thai training visa, 30 days longer than a standard tourist entry, with officials expecting tens of thousands of foreigners each year to arrive specifically to train.
What almost nobody talks about is the administrative side of a camp. The training is the easy part: you turn up and somebody tells you what to do. Everything around it is unstructured, and all of it gets handled from a phone or a laptop, wherever you happen to be staying.
What a camp actually involves off the mats
Consider a typical month. You pay the gym, usually by bank transfer and sometimes in instalments — a full camp runs anywhere from 9,000 to 40,000 baht a month depending on the gym and whether accommodation is included. You book flights, then rebook one of them. You deal with visa paperwork online. You move money between accounts because the exchange rate shifted, or because the gym takes a different payment method than you expected. Meanwhile your normal life keeps running: email, banking at home, whatever work you have not managed to pause.
All of that happens on gym Wi-Fi, guesthouse Wi-Fi, or the café next door. In Phuket, Chiang Mai or Bangkok those networks are shared with dozens of other people, most of them also passing through, and very few of them are secured in any meaningful sense. It is a long way from the controlled environment most Muay Thai practitioners are used to at home, where the only thing on the gym network is the sound system.
Why Thailand specifically
This matters more in Thailand than in most destinations, because the country is dealing with a well-documented fraud problem. Data from the Thai Police Online system records 1,058,056 online fraud cases reported between 2022 and 2025. A 2025 Global Anti-Scam Alliance study found that 72% of Thai adults had encountered scam attempts and 60% said they had been scammed within the previous twelve months. Thai investigators logged 7.6 billion baht in damages from online scams in the first four months of 2025 alone.
| 1,058,056 online fraud cases were reported through Thailand’s Police Online system between 2022 and 2025. |
Those figures describe the domestic population rather than visitors. But the infrastructure behind them — heavy reliance on instant transfers, commerce conducted through messaging apps, and a large fraud industry operating in the region — does not distinguish between a Thai citizen and a foreigner who has just wired 20,000 baht to a gym in Rawai.
The realistic version of the problem
None of this is an argument against going. It is an argument for spending twenty minutes on setup before you fly.
The exposure is not dramatic and it is not really about anyone targeting you personally. It is that a laptop on an open network is quietly doing several things at once that nobody would choose to do in public: sitting logged into email, syncing photos, holding a banking session open in a background tab. An unsecured network is exactly what the name says, and the traffic crossing it is not protected by the network itself.
The fixes are boring and they work. Turn off automatic Wi-Fi reconnection so your devices stop rejoining anything with a familiar name. Use a password for your bank that you use nowhere else. Switch on two-factor authentication for your email account, since that is the recovery route for everything else you own. And run a VPN, which encrypts the connection between your device and the internet so that whatever crosses the gym’s network is unreadable to anyone else sitting on it. If that is not already part of your setup, head over to ExpressVPN’s download page before you fly rather than trying to sort it out on arrival with a stranger’s hotspot and a jet-lagged brain.
One more line on the checklist
Fighters are generally good at preparation. Weight cuts get planned backwards from the date. Sparring gets scheduled. Flights get booked around recovery days. The digital side of a trip tends to get no attention whatsoever, right up until something goes wrong 8,000 miles from home, in a country where you do not speak the language and your bank’s fraud line is closed for the night.
It belongs on the same list as the visa and the vaccinations. A small item, sorted once, that you then never think about again for the rest of the camp — which is exactly what you want when the only thing you should be worrying about at 6am is whether you can make it through the second round of pads.