MANILA β In a plot twist worthy of a drama series, a veteran Singaporean actor fell for an online charmer who later turned out to be more of a con artist than his next romantic lead. Mr Laurence Pang, 78, lost nearly 1. The show, which airs on local television channel TV5 and YouTube, is hugely popular in the Philippines. On the show, Mr Tulfo would invite complainants, often regular citizens, to air their grievances on issues ranging from extramarital affairs to labour disputes.
Mr Tulfo would then contact the accused, and act as mediator between the aggrieved parties during the live broadcast. On the show, Mr Pang said he met Mika through the dating website called PinaLove β a play on Pinay, the colloquial term for Filipina, and love β some time in late The website is branded as a platform where foreign men can find Filipino girlfriends. Mr Pang admitted that he was quickly charmed by Mika, who seemed to show interest and indicated that she liked him during their online chats.
Some time later, Mika asked him to invest thousands of dollars to be a reseller of various products for an online platform, and he agreed. It was only much later that he realised he was reselling the products on a fake version of the Japanese e-commerce platform Rakuten. At first, Mr Pang resold products quickly. But after three days of brisk transactions on the e-commerce platform, he sensed something was wrong when he noticed the system was designed in such a way that resellers were prevented from withdrawing their profits as long as new orders kept flooding in.
The sales kept coming very fast Upon realising this, he removed all the products from his online store. But the website administrators must have managed to hack into his account, as the products were made available again, and new orders kept piling up.
He was stuck, unable to withdraw the money he had sunk into the venture. Mr Pang said that much later, he managed to do a video call with Mika, hoping to take a screenshot of her actual face, and he did.
