I didn’t know Nigerian princesses lived in the Phillipines.
This book is an excellent place to start if you want to learn about life in the Philippines.
They live in almost every third world country - and they’re stuck because they can’t get their money out.
I was talking to a woman in the Philippines for about 6-7 months, I sent $200 after Haiyan to help (I offered, she didn’t even ask). Once I did that, game changed. Suddenly everyone was supposedly hitting her up for “loans” because she has rich American boyfriend. Part of the reason I stopped talking to her was she asked for money to go visit relatives on a neighboring island. After quizzing her on her travel plans I figured out her estimated travel expenses were padded by about $300. I confronted her on it and she admitted she was trying to get extra to help another relative with home repairs which was apparently the whole point of the trip was to run that $300 to them.
Stopped talking to her after that.
I certainly hope I do because I’m Filipino. That informal lending you mentioned is common enough elsewhere so as not to make it distinctive to Filipinos. It’s insignificant or easily settled among high-income families, more institutional in the low-income. The most institutional system I see is the older generation expecting aid and hand-outs from the younger one; once the latter has been educated and about to become independent adults. But again, this is trivial in middle- to upper income families. It’s more common among the poor. The Philippine Government has no system to take care of retired and aged citizens.
To get back to the OP - the Philippines IIRC were Spanish until the Spanish-American war and then were American (with a brief Japanese interlude) until independence. Since the Spanish and particularly the Americans have not had debtors’ prison for well over a century or two, I seriously doubt it’s a feature of the current Philippine legal system, which I imagine is based on the previous governments’ systems.
Yeah, the current generation helping the older one, and the richer family branches helping the poorer is a feature of many cultures, especially in the third world where social safety nets are minimal. If you recall, Idi Admin simply acted on the frustration felt by many African leaders when he kicked the ethnic Indian merchant class out of Uganda. The Indian shopkeeper class typically made their profit off of the locals, then sent their profits home to India to support the rest of the extended family instead of re-investing in the local country.
(It’s my observation that while they may not have cared to assimilate with the African locals, the Asians coming over here do tend to assimilate within a generation - and find that their priorities lie more along the same lines as other Canadians, with financing their own education, homes, cars, and other luxuries rather than financing a bevy of distant relatives half a world away.)
^
OT. My lawyer-brother says Philippine civil and criminal law are based on Spanish law, while corporate and constitutional law (and some others) are based on US. This partly explain’s the surprise of many dopers at something I posted in another thread: If you catch your wife in bed with another man, and there’s a loaded gun within reach, you can kill the guy and chances are you’re scott free.
To answer the OP, from the Philippine Constition, Article III
(More here).
It does sound like a scam, but let me answer another point …
[QUOTE=drachillix]
I was talking to a woman in the Philippines for about 6-7 months, I sent $200 after Haiyan to help (I offered, she didn’t even ask). Once I did that, game changed. Suddenly everyone was supposedly hitting her up for “loans” because she has rich American boyfriend. Part of the reason I stopped talking to her was she asked for money to go visit relatives on a neighboring island. After quizzing her on her travel plans I figured out her estimated travel expenses were padded by about $300. I confronted her on it and she admitted she was trying to get extra to help another relative with home repairs which was apparently the whole point of the trip was to run that $300 to them.
[/QUOTE]
As others have said upthread, the Philippines is a poor country. $200 is a month on minimum wage (most people don’t even get that). So that’s a bunch of money, and yes everyone will suddenly start hitting her up for money. She shouldn’t have lied to you about it, of course.
Many people’s solution is finding a rich boyfriend (or, more rarely, a rich girlfriend) and they’re almost certainly going to be a foreigner. People do this through various methods, some are pretty up-front and some less so. Sometimes this is a situation that works out well for everyone involved, other times not. And yes, you do normally get the whole family as well.
There are also many people who look for foreigners to scam via the internet, pretty much as described above. But on the other hand if you’re a Filipina with a nice picture on your Facebook page then you’ll get a surprising number of people out the blue contacting you, wanting to meet up, wanting pictures, etc, etc. It’s actually pretty hard to resist the temptation to scam them.
All this is to say that while the girl in the OP is being dishonest, it isn’t necessarily a complete scam. Actual in the OPs case it is, but I wanted to make the point it isn’t always.
Interesting. Of course you could just have them arrested as well since infidelity is a criminal offense (but only when the wife does it …)
Expats living in the Philippines find the problem of people asking for “loans” to be sufficiently annoying that it causes some to give up on the PI and go home. I plan to live part of each year there in my retirement and I’ve collected a nice set of strategies for dealing with loan-seekers. If you are interested, PM me and I will share.
Expertise on something rarely extends beyond one’s nose. If avoiding borrowers is a problem to you, you either stay inaccessible or stick with a story: you’re broke and that’s why you’re in crummy Philippines. The trouble is too many westerners come flashing supposed wealth in order to seduce innocent Filipinas, and take advantage of their financial predicament. So it’s usually a problem of their own making.
nm
Hell, they still jail people for debt in Ireland.
Run up enough traffic fines and/or parking infringements in Australia, and you’ll find yourself in jail quick smart too.
Just sayin’.
I would never be so disrespectful.
They do say the best con artists can make you think it was your idea in the first place.
True, but I was planning on going to visit there early December, cancelled due to Typhoon most of the city she was in (Ormoc) didn’t have power for 2 months, and much of the infrastructure to get around was going to be down for weeks if not months. She never groused about needing money and had just come off working in taiwan making way more than $200/mo. Tons of phone skype chats during breaks at work, and several outdoor video chats showing landmarks that placed her in Taiwan, etc so either she was a very long slow scammer with a full time job or was legit. I don’t think she was a scammer per se so much as had a ton of family pressure applied under bad circumstances. There were a couple very weepy apologetic skype chats after that and promises to never ask for anything like that again, I just wasn’t feeling very forgiving at that point. IF she had asked for $100 extra on a $200 trip I might have considered it. $300 on top of what I easily discovered was a $40-50 round trip ferry ride really made me extremely unhappy.
Did she initiate the move (or tell you she was moving) to Ormoc before the typhoon was in the news and likely to hit there?
She had told me she was from Ormoc like 7 months before Hiyan. So not an issue.
Man, this lady sounds like a master con artist. Now we just have to work out how she engineered the typhoon.
She probably gave in to her relatives who put intense pressure on her to ask for more money. I’ve seen it happen with my wife’s relatives who live on Leyte. There is no doubt they need whatever they can get, so the usual pressure to give gets ratcheted up to eleven.
A rule of thumb for expats married to Filipinas and living in the PI is to live at least an hour’s journey from the wife’s family so they don’t find it easy to show up uninvited looking for whatever they can get.