There’s a new modus by enterprising people pretending to be representatives of e-commerce sites claiming unsuspecting folks of winning random prizes.
The M.O. goes like this:
1) Someone calls a random person and pretends to be a representative of a company or international courier service.
2) The caller then tells the victim they won a prize by random raffle. If the caller is from a fake company or e-commerce site, they may reveal the prize (like a luxury wallet) but then the winner needs to pay the processing fee somewhere between Php600 to Php900.
3) If the caller pretends to be from an international courier, they will tell the victim that they don’t know the contents of the package but hinted that the package seems valuable. They will then ask for a delivery charge of just under Php500.
4) The victim agrees to the processing fee or the delivery charge, excited that they won something valuable and only had to spend a few hundred pesos for it.
5) Once the fee is settled, the package arrives only to discover that the luxury item is a fake (worth Php300 or less) or that the mystery box has nothing inside it but a piece of rock.
This is actually very similar to the old trick about foreign lottery winning scams but has been developed to adapt to a localized target.
With the popularity of e-commerce in the Philippines, more and more small-time or fly-by-night e-commerce operators (or merchants) are trying to scam (the local term is budol) unsuspecting customers.
It usually starts small, like going thru previous customer records and randomly sending them a COD (cash-on-delivery) item. The item might be of low value or have been stuck in the warehouse and not moving at all. In order to get rid of these wasted inventory, the merchant will attempt to make the COD delivery. If the recipient is around to receive it, they may or may not pay for the “unknown” item. If the recipient is not around and somebody else in the same household accepts and pays for the delivery, then the scam is a success. Worst case — if no one accepts, the cost of the scam will be the RTS (return to sender).
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