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Some time ago my mother discovered a real estate investment opportunity. A luxury resort was accepting investors, so for the price of around P200,000, you can own a room at the resort and get a share of the profit whenever you rent it out. In my opinion, it sounded like a decent deal. It was somewhat risky as we don’t know how much business that new resort will get and the location might not be that good.

I had my doubts especially when they didn’t immediately send us the terms and conditions of the contract and they only gave us a brochure, but our family did have money for it. After my mother sent the first deposit and she started asking about the full terms, the representative finally told her the details. We’ll get to use or rent out a room… for one week every two years. We’ll also need to pay some maintenance fees every month.

That’s no investment. That was a scam! It was WAY different from the “own a resort room and rent it out” deal that the first promoter said. It was blatant false advertising. Although my mother couldn’t withdraw the initial P18,000 deposit, we were glad to have exited that scam before things got worse.

Well, that was just one example of a scam. What does it mean when something seems “too good to be true”? Let’s talk about the most popular kinds of scams here in the Philippines next.