Philippines Scams & Warnings

Welcome to Philippines Scams. I will start by saying the scams posted here are the thoughts, opinions and alleged experiences of the posters, not the owners of this site. We merely facilitate those who feel they need to post about their experience. We do not condone or condemn anyone mentioned here. If you feel you have been wrongly treated in any way, email us and we will be happy to investigate the matter, perhaps even remove the offending post right away if we believe you have indeed, been wronged.

The purpose of this site is to give warning to those who may fall afoul of the scammers in the Philippines while enjoying the hospitality there and the many honest and wonderful Filipinos. We would love to host a site called wonderfulfilipinos.com however as with newspapers, it’s the bad news that sells.

The Right Filipino Partner

This is THE most often discussed and talked about topic when it comes to moving\retiring in the Philippines. I was naive or better put ignorant about this when I came. Let me put it bluntly this way. Not all, but many Filipino girls are fishing. They are at the lake with their line in the water trying to catch the “golden” fish. Catching the golden fish is a life changer. Not only for the Filipino girl but in most cases her family too. A big life changer. The games and the scams are many. Being a foreigner here is like having a tattoo on your forehead, “I’m rich, take advantage of me”.

Here is my experience. Early on I met a girl on the net that lived 90km away from Cagayan de oro. She was poor, had 6 brothers and sisters and a mother and father, all very poor people. She was beautiful and sexy, using that to change her life and that of her family. I can not really blame her, she was using what she had to better herself and family. She was fishing and landed a golden fish. I learned later that she worked all day in the local market earning 50-100 pesos and then spending the evening at the Internet fishing. I wanted to meet and marry a Filipino girl. After spending 150,000p for animals, tuition and help for her family, time drew near for us to leave to for the USA. Then her father wanted 5,000p sent to him a month. She asked that I pay a 30,000p debt of her father. Finally, she ask if she could have her work when we went to the States. I asked why, there was no need. She told me it was to support her family. That is when it finally came to me, marrying her would be like marrying the whole family. She could not leave them poor and I could not blame her, it just would not work.

Reading about someone who was scammed and had to move back to their home Country is sad. Don’t let it happen to you.

There are many signs to watch for. Asking for money or needing money is a big one. There are others. Get on some Groups or Forums and ask questions. The more you know and learn, the better your life will be here. Feel free to e-mail me at hughes3864@yahoo.com

Best wishes

Brad Hughes

Cagayan de oro

The simple advice I or anyone can give is that if you are asked for money in any form, bale out fast. Internet cafes are cheap and affordable for all Filipinos bar the very poor and why chase one of those? You will have absolutely nothing in common with her if she is so poor she can’t afford twenty cents for an hour online.

Demands for cash come in many guises. The clever ones don’t ask outright, they just tell you their tale of woe and you offer from the goodness of your heart. After all, it’s only funny money. But even peso’s add up.

If she is so unlucky as to be a walking disaster area then you are best out of it. How did she manage her life before you rode up on your cyber white stallion? Why is it your mission in life to fix hers? Are you marrying someone to love or somebody you can impress and have grateful to you? That doesn’t last long and she will soon expect more and more.

Filipinas are no different than any other woman when it comes to the core reasons for a relationship. They are just lots of them, fairly accessible and tend to overlook things their western sisters wouldn’t. Of course, bottom line is that if you were dating a woman in your home town it could cost you a hundred bucks a night for dinner and drinks, probably more. So why not send her twenty bucks and enjoy the charade? Play the game and see if you can catch her out, then have a giggle together over it.

Nothing wrong with that so long as you know she’s scammin’ and don’t mind. Like the other day my wife had her credit card stolen and asked me to have it cancelled. I checked with the bank and told her to forget it, the thief was spending less than she did!

We came across this the other day and felt we had to include it if only because so many of the Chat Cam scammers are ‘Bakla’. (Tagalog) ‘Bayut’ (Visayan), aka ‘Transgender’. Also called ‘Bini Boys’ from the days when they cruised Mabini Street in Ermita well after dark, they lack the grace and good looks of the Thai Katoeys but are none the less lethal when they turn nasty.

From the Inquirer Global Nation Website:

By Cynthia Balana
Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 03:40:00 06/24/2009

I know several foreigners who have fallen for the card game scam. Basically you are befriended by a Filipino male or males. They may have a female ‘cousin’ with them to soften your suspicions but the Filipina will be a girlfriend of one of the gang. They will take you somewhere off the beaten track to play cards, maybe for fun or they might suggest a few pesos bet. Peso’s? Play money! Maybe but not if you lose enough of them, then they add up to real money!

You will be given drinks to loosen you up and help you relax and trust them. You will enjoy a winning streak and then they will pounce. Someone will suggest upping the stakes and before you know it, you are being escorted to an ATM by a couple of really heavy looking cut throats to draw out as much as you can.

If your gambling debts are high enough they will insist on holding your passport, air ticket and taking you to the ATM again when more money can be accessed. These guys don’t mess around, they will hurt you, maybe even kill you if they feel like it.

So why do foreigners fall for this? Why do men gamble in the first place? I don’t play cards, I only ever bet on myself and then I bet everything I have. But gambling is greed and greed is what makes every scam and con work. That get something for nothing possibility is too much for some to resist. Well, I reckon you deserve everything you get. The simple solution is don’t gamble and especially don’t gamble with Filipinos you barely might know.

Some years ago the tourist areas in Manila were targeted by ‘Ativan Gangs’, so named because of the drug they used to knock out unsuspecting victims. They would befriend a foreigner, usually spotted at an ATM or leaving his hotel and use a ruse such as being the hotel security officer on his day off or the customs officer at the airport that processed him through.

They usually have a female with them and she is very friendly and attentive, perhaps with a sister or cousin. The males are always relatives to make the girls seem available, even if only subliminally. One friend of mine, a very intelligent and well travelled middle aged man was a victim. He is neither gullible nor stupid yet he fell for their scam. He got into a car with them on the premise of seeing the sights, guided by locals etc big mistake number one. He was offered some orange juice from a can that was already open, big mistake number two.

He has no recollection of anything that happened next except waking up in an alleyway, stark naked and totally cleaned out. Some passing Filipinos helped him find something to cover himself and called an ambulance as well as the police. Basically he is lucky he woke up at all. Some victims are murdered and their bodies dumped.

If you want to make friends with Filipino males, you should pick who you befriend, not the other way around. There are reports of a gang back in Manila using a similar SOP to the Ativan gangs of the 1990s and early 2000’s.

Hello I am  Chris Bass. I have been scammed as well.I met ” Nikka on line as many of us do. She was working in a bar at the time this was in 2001, I heard her tales of losing her job then going to work for a shop whereher boss tried to have sex withher , losing bracelets watches being robbed and like a fool i believed her.Why? I had fallen in love. Now  I fell so hard that i agreed to meet herin the Philippines in the Manila area and i stayed atthe copacabana hotel. She even got me to move to s cheaper one which was still a good hotel . called lonely hearts. It saved me alot of money

This helped draw me to trust her.  I spend two weeks getting to know her and chose to marry her . Her family was glad for that .Well  , we filed and i went thru all the motions. and we were maried. I  did not know that in HongKong to work in bars or shops you must be married to a local resident. 

I was happily married for three days then my visa ran out. They told mei had to go home now and aply for another and i believed them. I went home filed for agreen card for Veronica and waited, Files were lost  andi fought with imigration about it, refiled forms paid moremoney timeand again. all this time sending 500 usd a monthto my wife.I saw heron theinternet as i senther a web cam for theplace she rented a computer from to seeme. I believed that crap. Well, it turns out thatVereonica  wentto Catubig and pissed away every dom dollar i sent on building a house for her mother and brother to live in, then went back to the philippines to knock down her sisters boyfriends house and rebuilt a two story house in Perpetual village 6 mambig foour , lot 10 bacoor cavite

   used my moneyto do it.  Now i sent money religeously and believed my wife to be in the phil waiting dutifully for me. As i have learned she left 10 months later after giving birth to our son and giving the baby up to her sister Marilyn galit.   And ten months afeter i left the phil she left to goto work again in HongKong. Back to her husband.

I did not learn this until after nearly two years. I ran a small company in the usa making money for our future. When her sister let the cat out of the bag and mentioned her indian hubby or her chinese hubby i got worried and confronted her , she denied of course, i kept supporting her until decidedto see what was true. i stopped sending meoney, she stopped communicationg altogether,Searches forher were in vain

her sister even moved away from Caviteas i learned.  Veronica is  on the internet as kissable 2004 in wqquary bay on filipina friend finder, and on  filipina heart .com  she is  “jelly” memebr number 199 199  and cvlaims to be single in Wan Chai area of Hongkong.  I am here now searching for her

  You see guys if you marry a pinay, you are married for life. Thereis no divorce in the philippines. Even if you divorce in another country, in the philippines you are still married \ It cost ten thousand USDollars to get an anullment in the philippines and likely the court

It is great to see some new scams being reported here. I have spoken to dozens of men who have been scammed online by this new wave of chatscam Filipinas. Many of them are Bayut or Bakla, transexuals who are vicious, nasty and very cunning. Others are real women but have realised they can make a very lucrative living this way, playing on our generosity and loneliness.

First of all, everyone in the Philippines survived before they met you and they will survive once you are gone. It is not your place in their lives to keep them in cash and cosmetics!

Secondly, internet access costs as little as P10 an hour in some places. The most I have ever seen is P30 an hour in an upscale mall. The US$ is nearly P50, so we are talking between a dime and a quarter to chat for an hour. You send fifty bucks by Western Union and they can either chat for 200 or more hours or they can feed their family for a month on rice and dried fish, the staple diet.

Third, the good ones are too proud to ask for money in any way. My wife was in hospital with her father efore we were married. He was having serious stomach operations and she and her mom and sister were his ‘watchers’. The nurses do nothing, the doctors do little else and the security guard won’t let the watchers leave to buy food and medicines outside the hospital if the bill hasn’t been paid up to date. Don’t believe me? Your perogative but I speak the truth. Well as I said, I had to wring this out of my wife to be and force her to accept some cash to help out, but barely enough for them to buy some food, she refused all help withe the huge hospital bill and she even had to endure the ignominy of passing the hat around at her old school! But she did that rather than ask me for money. Her and her Mom applied to a charity for funding and even tried to mortgage their home, borrowed from an uncle who works overseas and still wouldn’t accept a centavo from me.

There are plenty of them over there but of course the scammers know how to get your attention and push in. Test them and find a good one. My eBook ‘Filipina 101′ tells you how, what to write and ask and so on. If it doesn’t save you the cover price of just US$29.99 you have 30 days to get a full refund and yes, some guys scam me and get the refund even though they loved the eBook!

I chatted to a lot of filipina ladies, but when it came to money I just deleted them,but one night in a Filipina  chat site, one young lady got the best of me.  we went to yahoo to chat

we opened up our web cams and started talking, her name on her id was cristy_ann, we started a nice repore then she started to work on me, knowing I was planning to marry a filipian lady , she gave me her phone number to call her, but I didnt have international calling on my phone, we met just about the same time every night my time, she had all the right words to say to me. and she used them against me knowing what I was looking for,  she promised she wasn’t a scammer, and wasn’t like other ladies that try to scam men, she wanted me to send her money for the cafe’.this was after a few days of chatting. so I asked my friend who just moved to the Philippines in April of this year after he met his new wife on a Filipina chat room, I asked him while he was talking to her from the states if he ever sent her money to chat he said yes, so I said what the heck, I told cristy_ann I needed her real name and address to send the money by Western Union. and most people don’t use there given in yahoo chat, she told me her name was Romelyn , still at this point I had no reason to doubt her, so I sent her $45 dollars. lets say she took me for a three months ride chatting with her every night. then came the love words, and believe me she was good doing it playing on my emotions ex. I love you,it would be a honor to marry you, wish you can come here over the Christmas Holidays to visit me and my family, get the point….I guess you can say I was love struck.

she even brought her two younger sisters on cam to see me, she would say why would I scamm you if I gave you my phone number and brought my sisters to see me on cam..  I’ll be honest she got me for some more money, over the three months, and I was planning to move there the comming year 09″ to get married, met her on June 5,08 til September 15, 08′ was the last time she ever chatted and called me, I told my friend in the Philippnes I know I just got scammed, so his wife looked on Friendster after I gave her the name Romelyn, plus his wife knew what she looked like from the pic I sent her,behold Romelyn wasn’t the girl I met as cristy_ann,, both Romelyn, and cristy ann were two different sisters, they both had web sites on Friendster . so they were both working on me at the same time, I never met Romelyn before, but this finding didnt come in time til after she stopped chatting and calling me,,she change the simms card on her phone, so I caouldn’t call her to find out what happend that she stopped chatting, remember this all took placebrfore I found friendster, I think she started to realize towards the end , I started to pick up on the scamm but was to late for me the damage was done,, my friends wife try texting her and e-mailling her to at least write me and apologize, but we all know that wasnt going to happen, so after looking at over 100 pics she had on her site, I relized she never was at a cafe’ from the start, she was in a house In surigao del sur,Tagbina which was the address she gave me to wire the money. but thwere is more to this story, after my head cleared up somewhat.  I did doubt her in the beginning, but she must have learned these scamm from someone because she played me to the end.tonight after two weks of not hearing frome her, I get on my computer after work and saw a off-line message, the ID I didnt know so I cliked on the message and it read”How is life now im back after two weeks you surprised hehehehe”. she is using a different ID now on yahoo to scamm other men, but when I put the ID that she used to send the off-line messages yahoo didn’t reconized the name, like I said she and her sisters are good at this, so I am at the point how can I believe what another Filipina lady tells me even if she doesnt ask for money, all the powerful words cristy used on me would make any man believe what she was telling them ” dont leave me” I love you so much, I miss you everynight, my mom said as long as im happy she is happy, like I said lots of woman asked for money but I never sent it, but crity ann, got my money, Western Union wants to hear from me about this scam, along with the FBI, so I will let you good people know what happends next, since I have the addresses, pictures, yahoo IM she sent,and all the control numbers for the time I sent her money, she did a good head job on me to be honest,,,live and learn

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Have been victimized by a few girls from the Philippines. In particular, those who have fake, free profiles from website Filipinaheart.com. I made several complaints regarding woman who place fake pictures and profiles to attract attention to which the website responds with a refusal to remove such people from the site.  Recently, I was in correspondence with one JANICE KASPA who I would speak to over the phone.  She refused to go on webcam so I decided to send her money to purchase a webcam. She would take the money and would claim the webcam doesnt work.  I believed her. After two months I decided I would want to meet her during my next visit to the Philippines. Claiming she was from General Santos City, I sent her money thru Western Union to purchase a plane ticket. A few hours after she took the money, I spoke to her and she had a story of how she was just robbed and her purse stolen. She claimed to be at the police station, so I asked to speak to a police officer. She hung up the phone. Never heard from her again.  I went back on Filipinaheart, and sure enough a new profile was created using her friends name Laila Mae Lapang, using same fake pictures she emailed me. Beware of these SCAMMERS. No webcam, dont even bother with them.