Rant: The Good Times Just Keep On Rolling

Can you feel the sarcasm? Seriously.

Most people know that I just got out of one calamity when I endured Ondoy with Bruce and a couple of other friends.

Just as things are starting to pick up, another mishap happens. I get scammed.

Yes. Call me an idiot. I got scammed. I think I'm going to change my name to Jinxed or something.

What happened? Well, some impostor texted me saying that he sent a balikbayan package to my aunt with our names on the items. Told me that he got a roaming sim so that it's cheaper to text.

Naturally, since I know that my uncle was abroad, I immediately felt at ease. He offered a proposition about how Pinoys in Australia were buying load for their roaming sims at double the price. He said I could make money by selling load through him.

Thinking that it was my uncle, I agreed. He said that he had a buyer waiting for five, 500-peso load cards to use. He told me he was going to send the money immediately via Western Union once the buyer hands over the money. That sounded good enough for me.

To cut the story short, I got the dude the load and sent him the PINs. When I got home (at Bruce's house) I saw that my uncle was online. I asked him how to claim money via Western Union. I can't describe how shaken I was when my uncle asked me where the money was coming from. I was even about to tell him that he was supposed to be sending me money.

Instead, I asked him if he had a roaming sim. He told me it was too expensive to maintain so he never got one. The funny thing was, the dude pretending to be my uncle was still texting me to find a way to produce ten, 500-peso Globe load cards and five more 500-peso Smart load cards.

I told him to pay me up first so that I can use the money to buy the load for him. But he wouldn't agree. I stopped texting him back and tried contacting Smart to have the loads cancelled so that the impostor can't use it.

Unfortunately, no one was answering.

I tried going for Globe's chat support. Unfortunately, their chat client sucked big time. The representative didn't even see my messages. She just left thinking I wasn't replying at all. I tried calling their hotline to report the scammer's number, but the signal seemed to be too erratic. One second you can hear the dude loud and clear, the next second you can't even hear white noise. I'm guessing the dude kept putting me on mute.

The bottom line is, I'm an idiot. I'm going to file for a name change. You can now call me Moron.