5 for 20

What if someone comes up to you and convinces you to give him 5 pesos in exchange of 20 pesos? What
if he asks 500 pesos in exchange of 2000 pesos? And what if he asks for 5000 pesos in exchange of 2000
pesos? Sounds pretty interesting and lucrative, right? And since your income has been snailing for quite
some time now… it wouldn’t hurt to “surrender” the only money left in your pocket just to see it
multiply before your eyes. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll get to witness how your money doubled—no
multiplied by multiple times. Perhaps you’d be so ecstatic about it that you start sharing it with your
friends to do the same or you start giving more money in exchange of the promised multiplied amount.

But you see, this is too good to be true. And one does not simply roam around the city and give out
money at the expense of nothing. Before you know it, the trickster will be gone in a blink of an eye,
taking not only your money that you “re-invested”, but also your friends’ money that you recruited.
Then the con artist preys on to another target and do the same scheme all over again.

This is what we call a dubious investment scam. When it’s too good to be true, it is indeed to good to be
true. They say it is only for those who are risk takers. Yeah sure but what the “investors” do not know is
that, the more we invest in this illegal scheme, the more we feed the “big players” the chance to
manipulate not only the marginalized population but our economy as well. This is just a caution to those
who are easily attracted to getting high returns and (unbelievable) low to zero risks.