#scam in the philippines

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. 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). 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. Read more in our articles including "Beware of this new modus by tele-scammers" and "A conversation with a Text Scammer".