THIS Filipino woman’s story has become commonplace lately, but it is still worth telling and retelling to drive home the point, especially to our young people whose desire for a better income and help their families at home has led them to personal ruin instead.
This story was relayed by Bureau of Immigration (BI) Commissioner Norman Tansingco, who did not say the woman’s real name.
Let us call her Liza, a hardworking domestic household worker in Bahrain who has just finished her contract and was returning to the Philippines.
Liza worked for one year and eight months in Bahrain, was treated well by her employer, and was coming home with some savings for her family back home. At the back of her mind, though, she was worried what job opportunity was waiting for her in Manila, if any.
‘The moral of the story is to check with the proper government authorities whenever one considers working abroad.’
Tansingco said she was returning to the Philippines two months ago when “during a layover of her return flight to Manila at the airport in Dubai, she was reportedly approached by a male stranger who offered her a job as a call center agent in Thailand with a monthly salary of P50,000,” Tansingco said.
Lured by the promise of a high-paying job, the victim accepted the stranger’s offer and joined the latter in flying to Bangkok instead of going home to the Philippines.
Upon arriving in Bangkok, Liza said, she was transferred to Chiang Rai province in Thailand, where they took a boat going to nearby Laos.
However, when she was not paid while working in a “love scam,” the overseas Filipino worker (OFW) ran away and sought the assistance of the Philippine embassy in Vientiane, Tansingco revealed. She was successfully repatriated from Laos.
Commissioner Tansingco noted that this story and similar personal misadventures have been repeated several times with various Filipinos as victims.
The BI chief advised OFWs to avoid strangers who offer work abroad as call center agents with high salaries.
These strangers “will only make your lives miserable at the expense of your families who depend on you for financial support,” he pointed out.
Filipinos who are in need of a job whether he or she is in the Philippines or abroad should be able to check with the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW), the government agency in charge of facilitating the overseas employment and reintegration of Filipino workers.
Lately, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and the DMW have been pestered with cases of Filipinos being trafficked in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia and victimized by syndicates involved in scams and cybercrimes. A recent case was a group of eight Filipinos who were convinced by a syndicate led by a Chinese employer to work as cryptocurrency scammers. DFA personnel spent a couple of weeks negotiating with Cambodian authorities to bring them back home.
Last year, another group of 12 Filipinos who fell victim to the large-scale human trafficking operations were also repatriated by the DFA.
The moral of the story is to check with the proper government authorities whenever one considers working abroad.
