You have to give it to Filipinos for always injecting humor in everything they do – even in the perpetration of scams. The recent news about the unauthorized fund transfers from BDO depositors’ accounts to the UBP account of Mark Nagoyo brought to the fore the issue of bank liability for online scams and the Filipino brand of humor.
I suspect that whoever is the perpetrator of this scam is a Filipino, considering that only a Filipino would fully understand the irony of the manner this scam was done. The last name of the UBP account holder “Nagoyo” is a Filipino word which means “you have been fooled.” What caught my attention though was its seeming similarity with another last name that is very familiar to those who are into cryptocurrency: Nakamoto. I really thought that what I was reading was the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious developer of Bitcoin. Whether this seeming similarity with the name of the Bitcoin developer was intentional or not, we will only find out once the perpetrator has been arrested.
According to the affected BDO depositors, they never authorized the fund transfers to Nagoyo. Some said they clicked a link they received (which makes this a case of phishing), but some said they never received, much less clicked, any link at all. Understandably, the BDO depositors are up in arms. They vented their anger and disappointment on social media. No less…
