Aubrey Drilon, 29, lost hundreds of thousands after she was enticed to invest in a money-making scheme that promised to double her money in less than two weeks on March.
“Noong una, okay naman siya. Talagang nababawi mo ‘yung ininvest mo. Tapos maraming na-engganyo mag-invest. After ilang months na okay ‘yung operation ng Tether, one day, me, along with my hundreds of downline investors nagulat kasi bigla nalang hindi na ma-access ‘yung Tether (Muyan66) website,” Drilon said.
Like most people looking for easy money amid hardships caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Drilon, a housewife, knew she had to invest more for her three kids.
Drilon was recruited as one of Muyan66’s pioneer investors in Palawan, and she managed to recruit family members, friends, and local entrepreneurs in different towns of the province. By the time the corporate regulator stopped the alleged Ponzi scheme in July, she lost more than P700,000 along with millions of pesos her downline investors capitalized on.
Financial fraud plays a big business even before the pandemic outbreak, costing victims around the world $5.13 trillion a year. It has worsened in new and unforeseen ways. Nevertheless, people are still lured to different Ponzi websites just to profit some easy money for their expenses on a day-to-day basis.
Recently, hundreds of Palawan investors were again tempted to try out Tunegaga, a money-making website that promises to double your earnings even before two weeks. Tunegaga, unlike Muyan66, pays you for just watching 15-second short video commercials. The website created different “upgrade plans” for investors. The cheapest account upgrade costs P1,969.80 which entitle you to a yearly earning of P29,092.4. While the premium account upgrade costs around P121,218.61, which as the site informed, will lead you to a P1,818,279.14 yearly profit.
As of this writing, Tunegaga’s site can’t be accessed by its investors and account holders. A number of its investors said that the site suddenly just crashed late afternoon Tuesday, December 14.
Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by the new investors.
The Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) has published more than 19 public warnings of the Ponzi Scheme and other money-making investment platforms since 2019, even before the coronavirus pandemic.
SEC also consistently advises the public to double-check money-making investment websites before investing money through their site (www.sec.gov.ph) in order to determine if it is registered in the government and has a legal capacity to operate in the Philippines.