Filed under General Interest
Erika Legara obtained her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Physics from UP Diliman, garnering the Most Outstanding Graduate Student Award and the Edgardo Gomez Excellence in Dissertation Award when she was conferred her Ph.D. degree in 2011. She specializes in the areas of complex networks and computational social science. She has been a member of the Complexity Science group of the UP National Institute of Physics since 2004 and is now doing post-doctoral work at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore. She can be reached at etlegara (at) gmail.com.
Exploitative pyramiding scams masquerading as legitimate multilevel marketing (MLM) schemes have once again evoked the attention of our government regulators and lawmakers, especially with the recent investment racket involving Aman Futures Group that allegedly conned some 15,000 individuals across the Visayas and Mindanao regions out of P12-15 billion. This is not the first time that massive fraudulence through investment scams has plagued our society. In 2003, the New York Times reported a case involving about a million Filipino investors, mostly OFWs and their families, who lost over $2 billion in a pyramid scheme backed by a company called Multinational Telecom Investors Corp. (Multitel). Four years later, another investment scam disguised as a high-yield investment program was exposed. FrancSwiss was a Ponzi scheme that swindled Filipino investors out of P1 billion in valuations. The list goes on, and one would actually think that we would have already learned from these frauds. Unfortunately, such is not the case. Last December, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued yet another warning to the public about an investment scam operating in Cagayan province, Ilocos Norte, and Camiguin that particularly targeted domestic helpers — promising them a P900 profit every month for every P100 investment made.
