Scamming the penniless

If scamming the rich is not bad enough, how about scamming the poorest of the poor? The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has issued a warning that some people are making money from the government’s conditional cash transfer program.

And nope, the DSWD was not referring to its own officials who had been asked to fully account for the billions of pesos that had been released to them under the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction.

The DSWD claimed that some con artists have been going around urban poor and rural communities posing as DSWD personnel conducting a “Listahan” survey on who among poor families may benefit from the program.

The swindle is that the fake DSWD surveyors collected P20 from each of the families they “surveyed” which were just too happy to pay up for the chance to be included in the list of beneficiaries.

While P20 may seemed a pittance for most, not so in the case of those who were victimized in Maragondon and Magallanes in Cavite and in Morong, Rizal.

What’s galling though is DSWD’s statement that it is now coordinating with the police to catch the scammers. Why alert the con artists that the police are already on the prowl for them?

Kind of dumb isn’t it? -end-

Image by wordpress.com