MEDIUM RARE

There are fair weather friends and there are friends who use friendship to feed their needs and greed. 

Friends, colleagues, neighbors of an enterprising ex-government employee recently found to their regret that when it comes to fueling one’s greed, friends are an easy touch. When Jun (not his real name) found out that he had been had — and right in his own home — he went to the NBI to file a complaint and was told by the head of the investigating team, “You’re not the only one.”

As it’s common practice to treat friends as equals, victimizing a group means victimizing every member of that group. The lady’s modus operandi was simple enough. In aid of her mercenary streak, she owned a smartphone that carried a useful — and profitable — list of her so-called friends’ names and numbers. Unbeknownst to such good friends, they were about to lose their shirts and, to at least one of them, an about-to-retire journalist, her lifetime savings of more than a million pesos was programmed to disappear from her online account.

Being a smart operator, the lady entrepreneur had taken the charity route to snare her victims. The process started with a text: “Would you care to donate to a fund drive for typhoon victims?” An affirmative answer would lead to the next step of the scam. By using her son, supposedly a techie, to gain entrance into her friends’ homes with the offer of protecting their cellphones from a virus, the lady was able to withdraw lots of cash, courtesy of those friends’ hospitality, without leaving a fingerprint. If the medium is the message, cold cash was the result.

In Jun’s case, that friend’s 20-something son spent more than three hours working on Jun’s computer. When Jun began to wonder why the hunt for a virus was taking so long, his visitor quickly assured him that he was almost done. Minutes later, after the young man had left, Jun discovered he had been dunned for more than a hundred thousand bucks. 

“If he had stayed longer, he would have emptied my bank account!” Jun said. He was to learn later from investigators that the scammer’s high-tech defense was a case of her voice being “cloned.”