Don’t be fooled twice, says Filipina scam victim

 

Beware of refund offers coursed through this email address

If you get told by someone on Facebook that you can get back the money that had been fraudulently obtained from you by presenting a PayMaya account in the Philippines  that should have a substantial sum in credit, think again.

This is the advice of a Filipina domestic helper who narrowly missed being cheated out of her hard-earned salary for the second time, after being convinced by someone she only chatted with on social media that she could recover what she had lost the first time by filing a claim online with a group called “cyber crime report.”

Jenny T. posted on Facebook about the losses incurred by those who put money into a dropshipping company called Seataoo whose license had just been revoked by the US Securities and Exchange Commission when someone with the Facebook name Margaret Laplana sent her a private message asking whether she was a scam victim.

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Jenny replied that she lost money in a student visa scheme promoted by OFW blogger  Bryan Calagui who had also endorsed Seataoo via his Facebook account.

That was when Margaret told Jenny that she also lost money in Seataoo but was able  to recover a bit of it after sending an email to cybercrimereport3@gmail.com. She also said she knew of another Filipina named Jenny who also lost money in the Canada student visa offer but was able to get a refund after emailing the same group directly.

The fake PayMaya email address sends messages riddled with grammatical errors

Margaret told Jenny to send a refund request to the email address she mentioned as it was already midnight and not a lot of people would be emailing to file a similar claim.

Jenny did as told and almost immediately received a reply from “Pay Maya Help Support,” saying the case she had complained about, in which she lost about P132,000, had already been reported to them.

She was told that she could get a refund if she had a PayMaya account as that was where her money would be deposited. She was also told to submit evidence of the money she lost.

TAWAG NA!

Jenny immediately downloaded the PayMaya app and sent the receipt for the money she sent to the company that enticed her to apply for a student visa to Canada.

Friday morning Jenny received another email saying she could get P80,500 refund but she needed to show that she had at least P40,500 as “show money” in her PayMaya account. At the same time, she was told to send them her one-time password to her account so she could  supposedly get a reference number. The catch was, she had to deposit the required amount to her PayMaya account in 5 minutes to get her money.

As she had no means or funds to make an immediate transfer to the account, she asked Margaret for advice, and the latter readily showed her how she can send money from different payment platforms to PayMaya. Jenny balked, saying she needed the HK dollars that were in her account here.

As it was already morning, Jenny thought of consulting a chat group comprising other complainants in the alleged student visa scam and she was immediately told to stop communicating with Margaret and those offering her refund through email as they were obviously scammers.

She was also told to check the emails sent to her through “cybercrimereport3” and “PayMaya Help support” and note the badly constructed and ungrammatical messages sent to her, obviously in haste.

Other people in the chat helped check the email addresses she used in pursuing her claim, and showed her they were not connected with the PayMaya online payment platform, nor is there a group called Cyber Crime Report that offers refund to scam victims.

It took awhile for Jenny to accept  that she almost got scammed again, but after reviewing all her communications with Margaret and the people behind the pretend refund platforms, she began seeing all the red flags that should have put her on guard. Her resolve grew when she checked Margaret’s Facebook profile and saw that it was locked.

Someone called Margaret Laplana on Facebook initiated the refund offer

But all these came too late in preventing her from falling for yet another racket.

Early this year, a friend and a former cricket player approached her to say how sorry she felt upon learning that Jenny had lost a lot of money trying to pursue her dream of going to Canada. To recover her losses, this friend convinced Jenny to download an investment app ran by an Indonesian, where she was supposed to earn huge profits.

Jenny said she rejected the suggestion outright, but when she bumped into her friend in Central last January she was finally convinced to put in her entire monthly salary of $7,000 into the supposed investment scheme.

But no sooner had she done this that her friend told her she had been scammed as well, and that the matter had already been reported to the police. She now avoids talking to Jenny, and acts as if nothing has happened.

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