#ransom scam

Globe Telecoms and Smart Communications have issued a warning to the public about a new scam that involves receiving SMS and voice calls from an anonymous person asking for ransom and claiming that one of the subscriber’s loved ones were kidnapped. After that, the fake rep or an accomplice will contact the subscriber’s family and/or relative claiming that their love one was kidnapped and is asking for a ransom for his/her release. A lot of people still fall for this kind of scams (see how they make money out of this here). In a recent text message of this kind, I thought I'd indulge the scammer and play along to see how much effort they'd put into this. That's 1 hour of time the scammer wasted for nothing -- an hour he could have used to really scam others. Was thinking -- in a more crowd-sourcing kind of way -- if others can also take some time and waste this scammers time, then it might just frustrate them and make them think their MO isn't cost effective. Imagine if at least 100 people pretend to have a conversation with a scammer for one day just to make them busy, the promise of Php150 load might seem un-interesting. Read more in our articles including "Telcos warn subscribers about new Text Scam" and "Courier Complaints Drop 88% Under Oplan Bantay Padala".