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| 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company called Seataoo whose license had just been revoked by the US Securities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.
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.
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| 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.
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.
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| 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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