The first is about a male instructor from Mindoro who was duped of one thousand five hundred pesos by a woman.  The man along with his wife and daughter was shopping for a toy bike for the toddler at a department store in Manila.  As he was about to pay for his purchase, the man was accosted by a middle-aged woman in front of him and accused him of picking her pockets and stealing her money worth P2500.00.  The man, of course, vehemently denied the accusation and even told her that he could not do such a thing because he had money and even showed them to her.  The sales clerks who were assisting the man supported his claim but the woman would not hear of it and insisted that he return her money. 

To make a long story short the woman held on to her claim that the man indeed took her money such that the mall administrator suggested that she take her complaint to the police whose precinct was just outside the mall.  All the poor instructor could do was to ask the administrator to allow the sales clerks and the security guard to come along as witnesses.  On their way to the police station, the woman called up somebody on her mobile whom the instructor, who was within earshot, reckoned was a policeman based in Camp Crame.

At the station, the policeman on the duty asked them what the problem was and the woman went on to tell her story. The police then turned to the instructor and asked him a couple of questions.  Finally, he invited the sales clerks and the security guard out of the room for questioning.  When they came back the police asked the woman a series of questions and concluded that the man was innocent since the woman didn’t see him in the act of taking her money.

It was at this point that the police the woman called up earlier arrived and the instructor let the sales clerk do the talking for him.  After hearing the sales clerks, he approached the instructor and told him that the woman, who was allegedly her aunt wanted him to pay her even half of the amount she lost so she won’t press charges.  The man on the verge of tears pleaded his innocence.

A series of pleadings and threats ensued and at the end, the poor instructor from Mindoro had to shell out two thousand pesos of his hard-earned money to the woman just so he won’t be imprisoned. 

The email, which was forwarded to me, was signed by the instructor with his name and address. He even named the policeman and the woman who claimed to be an employee of DepEd. 

The second precautionary tale is a warning from MERALCO.  The email warns of five men posing as MERALCO employees complete with uniform and IDs who will ask to be let inside the house to check the appliances of every household to verify electric consumption.  If by any chance such men drop by your house, you are asked to call MERALCO’s hotline, 16-211.

The final warning is for motorists passing through the Magallanes underpass where a carjacking incident occurred late in the evening two weeks ago.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.  The world will not be wanting of con artists and criminals but with vigilance, they will not succeed.  Thanks to emails like this I am warned of various modus operandi and so I am very careful each time I ride a cab or enter a public restroom.  And with Christmas shopping reaching feverish pitch, it helps to be extra cautious.

But then again there are some emails circulating that are entirely untrue.  Three persons forwarded me the same email last week saying that Yahoo will be closing down and that anyone who has an account with Yahoo who does not receive the particular email will be deleted from its servers.  This is clearly is a spam so please stop forwarding this email when you receive it and just click on the delete button.  Spammers are just collecting the email addresses for malicious intent.

Let’s just make productive use of the technology available to us.

(For feedback, comments, suggestions email me at openingpagemb@yahoo.com)