Philippines Scams & Warnings

The easiest thing in the world is to laugh at someone else’s misfortune. To read their account of how they were taken for a ride and to think ‘how dumb is that?’.

Well, 20/20 hindsight is an exact science. What is not so exact nor a science is managing these scams while they are in progress. Keep in mind the scammers are usually professionals. They make their living by scamming people. They have a rat cunning and a street smart grasp of human psychology that gives them the edge.

As well, they know they are scamming while the mark doesn’t. These scams are also called confidence tricks and the scammers confidence tricksters because they con you. They convince you they are genuine by gaining your confidence and trust. Then they strike.

Forget Hollywood romanticized notions of ‘honor among thieves’ or that they are loveable rogues. Scammers and con artists are cheats, thieves, liars and sometimes worse. Likewise, don’t think their victims are all or always dumb, naive or gullible. We are all vulnerable to something, sometime. When on vacation we tend to think well of everyone, after all why visit a country at enormous expense and then despise and distrust everyone you meet?

Scammers choose their marks carefully. They play them like a fish and they usually make a few dummy runs to test the waters. Looking back, of course you can see the warning signs, lined up one after the other. But when you live the moment you can’t look back, you can only consider what is in front of you. There is as much reason to accept and trust as to distrust in most cases. If not, then the scammer is new to their graft.

Don’t judge anyone who posts here and don’t ever disparage them. They made a brave decision to post their experiences and share them with us so perhaps we can benefit from their mistakes. If you have never been conned or scammed then either you haven’t been around much or else they were so good you still don’t know you were had.