Nobody wants to admit they got scammed

A retired teacher in Iloilo spent weeks trying to talk her own daughter — a lawyer — into something called Joy Music Tech. Play short audio clips, collect a little cash each day, pull in a few friends, climb the tiers. The daughter went looking for a registered company by that name and found nothing. Just testimonials, most of them from other teachers.

That is who these schemes caught last year. Not the careless, but teachers, a lawyer’s mother, government workers who still will not let us print their names. People with diplomas, who checked, hesitated, and signed up anyway because their colleagues were already pulling PHP 10,000 a week out of Duob Top and, for a while, the math held.

Call it what the economist Joseph Ladrido calls it: “risk-seeking in a loss domain.” When wages sit still and prices climb, a scheme promising fat returns stops reading as reckless and starts reading as the only door left open. The average Filipino earns somewhere near PHP 20,000 a month now, and the real worth of that has been thinning for years. A salary that does not move against a cost of living that does — that is a population primed to gamble, and not because anyone is dumb.

The scammers understood this better than the regulators did. They borrowed the costume of work. JMT called its victims “employees” and handed them daily “tasks.” Duob Top wrapped itself in mobile-game skins and live streams. It felt like a side hustle, not a con.

Then comes the catch nobody warns you about. When the Securities and Exchange of Commission’s (SEC) Iloilo office moved against Duob Top — advisory dated November 26, 2025 — the case died. The lone complainant got cold feet and withdrew before signing the affidavit. No signature, no referral, no case. The Commission can post a warning. It cannot make an embarrassed person stand up and say out loud, I lost money to this.

And the mandate is split right down the middle. Securities fraud is the SEC’s to chase. The encrypted Telegram-and-WhatsApp plumbing belongs to the police Anti-Cybercrime Unit. Victims ricochet between the two while the operators — admins on +44 British numbers, AI-generated faces named “Lucy Mitchell” — quietly rebrand. Duob Top closed; Omni-Aire opened. JMT folded; Golirous was recruiting by December.

You cannot post enough advisories to outrun that.

The fixes are unglamorous. Quit treating financial literacy as a poor person’s problem — these victims were educated; what they lacked was cyber hygiene. Bring the training to where the recruiting actually happens, the faculty rooms and the local government unit (LGU) group chats. Let the SEC act on a pattern of complaints instead of waiting on one brave signature. Push the platforms harder, too; Telegram already tagged JMT’s channel as a scam, and it was still luring people in come June.

The engine underneath keeps running, though, exactly as Mr. Ladrido warned: people who feel left behind keep reaching for the next promise. Arresting scammers helps. Making their offer stop sounding sensible would help a lot more.