How a Facebook Comment Cost Me Two Months’ Salary

Marites counted the money twice before she wired it, because her hands were shaking and she needed to be sure.

Fifty thousand pesos. Almost two months of her salary at the call center in Ortigas, gone in one transfer, sent to a man she had never met in a country she had never visited, for a “customs release fee” on a package he said was full of gold jewelry and a laptop he wanted to bring her when he finally came home to Manila.

I promise you, mahal, this is the last one, he had voice noted her that morning, his accent smooth and careful, the kind of voice that made her believe engineers on oil rigs in the Gulf really did sound like that.

She had met Dexter on Facebook four months earlier, in a comment section under a worship video from Victory Christian Fellowship, the church her mother still dragged her to on Sundays when Marites wasn’t too tired from the night shift. He had liked her comment about grace and second chances. He messaged her an hour later.

By week two he was calling her his future wife. By week six he was sending her voice notes every morning, good morning texts with heart emojis, videos of sunsets over oil platforms that she now understood, looking back, could have been downloaded from anywhere.

Her best friend Jhoanna had tried to warn her in March.

Ate, why does a foreign engineer earning six figures in dollars need you to send him load, Jhoanna had said over isaw and beer outside their apartment in Cubao, the smoke from the grill stinging their eyes. Why can’t he just buy his own load.

He’s stuck on the rig, Jho. There’s no signal there. He has to use an agent.

And the agent needs your money.

It’s just five hundred pesos, it’s not that deep.

It had not stayed five hundred pesos. It became two thousand for a phone repair. Then eight thousand for a visa processing fee when he said he was finally coming to the Philippines to marry her. Then twenty thousand when immigration in Dubai supposedly held him for “documentation issues” and he needed a lawyer. Each time he cried on the voice note, or his voice cracked in a way that sounded too real to be acting, and each time she told herself this was the last one, the way people tell themselves a lot of things they need to believe.

Her mother thought she was saving for a car. Her officemates thought the constant phone checking meant she finally had a boyfriend, and she let them think it, because saying I have a boyfriend felt better than saying I have a stranger who calls me mahal and needs money for customs.

The package story started in June. Dexter said his late father, a British oil executive, had left him gold and a rare gemstone collection, currently sitting in a diplomatic courier’s custody at a facility outside Manila, waiting to be delivered to her personally as a show of good faith before the wedding. All she had to do was pay the release and clearance charges, because as a foreigner’s fiancée abroad, his hands were tied.

She looked up the courier company. It had a real looking website, a tracking number, a customer service chat that responded in under a minute. She did not know yet that scam operations sometimes build entire fake logistics companies just for this, complete with agents typing from call centers in a different country entirely, sometimes run by people who are themselves trafficked and forced to scam under threat, which is its own kind of horror she wouldn’t learn about until much later, on a Reddit thread at two in the morning that she read with her stomach in knots.

That Tuesday, the fifty thousand pesos, was supposed to be the final release fee. After that, Dexter said, the box was hers, and so was he.

She waited by her phone the whole day. Her shift supervisor asked twice why she kept stepping away from her desk. At 6pm, the tracking number stopped updating. At 9pm, Dexter’s account went quiet. By midnight, the number she used to voice call every night said the user was unavailable.

She did not sleep.

In the morning she called the courier company’s customer hotline and a recorded voice said the number was no longer in service. She searched the company name plus the word scam and found three Facebook groups full of women, some in Manila, some in Cebu, one in Davao, all telling the same story with different names. Different Dexters. Same fifty thousand. Same box that never came.

She told Jhoanna first, because she owed her that.

I know, Marites said, before Jhoanna could say anything. You don’t have to say it.

Jhoanna didn’t say I told you so. She just sat with her on the floor of the apartment, the fan turning slowly above them, and let Marites cry the ugly kind of cry, the kind that comes with hiccups, the kind that isn’t really about the fifty thousand pesos at all.

It’s not even the money, Marites said finally, wiping her face with the back of her hand. I have money problems all the time, everyone does. It’s that I let myself believe someone loved me because he said the right things at the right time. That’s the part I can’t get over.

She reported it to the bank, though everyone told her the money was already gone, moved through three accounts within an hour of her sending it, the way these things usually go. She reported it to the NBI Cybercrime Division too, mostly so there would be a record somewhere, proof that it happened, proof she wasn’t imagining the whole thing.

Three weeks later she deleted the Facebook account she had used to talk to Dexter, then made a new one, cleaner, no relationship status, no hearts under any comments about grace or second chances. Her mother noticed she’d stopped smiling at her phone in the mornings and asked if the boyfriend was gone. Marites said there was never a boyfriend, and her mother, for once, did not ask more questions.

She started reading about how to spot a scammer online, mostly out of a need to understand what had actually happened to her, and found herself, without meaning to, becoming the person in the comment section now, the one warning other women under posts that looked a little too familiar. Someone messaged her privately last month, said thank you, said she had almost sent someone forty thousand pesos for a similar box.

Marites still thinks about the voice notes sometimes, late at night, the sound of him saying mahal, and she cannot fully explain, even to herself, whether what she misses is him or just the version of her own future she had built around him.

I don’t regret loving him, she told Jhoanna, the last time they talked about it. I regret how easy it was for someone who never existed to make me feel like I mattered.

She has not opened a dating app since. She says she isn’t ready. Jhoanna doesn’t push her.

Some nights, when her phone buzzes with a notification, there is still a half second, before she even looks at the screen, where some old, stubborn part of her hopes it’s him.