One of the things that has been so eye-opening about the whole multi-language school fiasco is how little it bothers most people, least of all the Indonesian police or the Ministry of Education. There have been many thousands of people defrauded of hundreds or even thousands of dollars each, with the total losses clearly running above a million dollars. This has caused incredible hardship for many people. One man in Makassar reported losing a pile of money he had worked for three years to save.

It is also worth noting that the loud-mouth people who accused this blog of damaging lives have been tellingly silent about these schools too. Back in 2012 we were denounced as evil and selfish for (possibly) risking the jobs of a few shady people by exposing corruption at TBI (The ‘British’ Institute). A couple of job losses was viewed as an unacceptable risk, even though they were purely hypothetical. Yet in the multi-language school fiasco hundreds of teachers and staff have lost their jobs without being paid their back salaries and we’ve heard not a peep of concern from TBI, a scandal-plagued, fading language school chain in Indonesia. The TBI ‘managers’ are only outraged when their unethical antics are exposed. They don’t care less when honest people are damaged by corruption in the language school sector in Indonesia. All their outrage is saved for themselves, especially when they are exposed as visa scammers, character assassins and double-dealing liars- all of which is true in spades.

And On To the Real Victims

The victims of the multi-language school fiasco have had to face the indignity of seeing a few greedy con artists run off with large chunks of their money. Where is Frendy Horas these days? In prison? Dead? Rumors circulate wildly but the victims are still of pocket whatever the case may be. Jenty Lim and her romantic partner, Dutchman Marcel Staal, have fled to the Netherlands with their pickings from the pockets of Dunia Bahasa customers. One media report said that Dunia Bahasa students had been cheated of Rp7 billion rupiah, all of it paid for courses which never happened. Presumably Jenty and Marcel are now shopping for a nice villa in The Netherlands, bought with money stolen from Indonesian families. What a foul pair.

At Global Bahasa Cibubur the victims were Rp 4 billion worse off. And then there was the massive collapse of Global Language Centre, which claimed between 4,500 and 5,000 people. The amount of money stolen in total is at least a few million dollars. And has anyone seen the Repsol-riding Riswanda lately? He made a fast buck robbing trusting customers and was finally reported to the police. Despite 40 different people providing declarations that Riswanda had robbed them, including documentary evidence of payments made for courses which never happened, the National Police decided to release him after a day, citing ”lack of evidence.” The enraged victims of Riswanda knew that he had merely bribed his way out of jail. Riswanda has now disappeared and become a fugitive from his hundreds of furious victims. This is what the Indonesian language school sector has come to in 2015.