@Tim ********
It was a complete misunderstanding and I didn’t speculate on anything. My advice was indeed based on the "70,000 THB to an agent" information that normally would be reliable enough to come to a safe conclusion.
But who would have thought?
He mentioned having paid 70,000 THB to an agent for a “retirement extension”, so normally there is only one simple explanation for it
Everyone including Graham and me just had to come to the logical conclusion that he must have paid that sum for a "greased" Non-Imm-O Retirement Visa and the subsequent 1-year extension
Because if you use your own funds of a minimum of 800,000 THB, an agent would charge 12,500 to 15,000 THB maximum for such a service
His experience is so fully out of the normal. If he had made clear in his initial post that he used his own funds from the very beginning, this misunderstanding could have simply been avoided