MANILA – The Philippine Charity Sweepstakes’ Office (PCSO) on Monday warned the public not to patronize fake pages on social media using the agency’s name, logo and lottery products.
PCSO General Manager Alexander Balutan said he received reports that unscrupulous persons are using social media to deceive people.
“These fake accounts are not new, anyway. Pero mag-ingat po lagi tayo para hindi tayo mabiktima ng mga manggagantso [But let’s be careful so we don’t fall prey to scammers],” he said.
One of the latest monitored was a social media page with the logo of PCSO announcing that they will be giving away a house and lot to a lucky winner.
The winner, according to the announcement, will be selected from those who followed instructions on the social media page as their entry.
Among the instructions is to Like and Share the page, an obvious ploy to increase the audience share of the page, Balutan said.
At present, the page has more than 34,000 likes.
“However, if you look into the date they will be announcing the winner, it is April 1, which incidentally is April Fool’s Day,” Balutan stressed.
“We still don’t know if the owners of the site just want likes or will they be requesting for the ‘winner’ to give them some money to facilitate the turning over of the price similar to the ‘Nigerian’ scams using the email to scam people years ago,” the general manager said.
Balutan advised the public to instead visit the official website of the PCSO at www.pcso.gov.ph for official announcements, winning numbers and other updates from the agency or they could visit his Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/mandirigma83/ for updates and issues regarding PCSO.
