Third World Writer

I am a Filipino Freethinker, and recently my org has been nominated in two categories for the Globe Tatt Awards. With a chunk of the criteria coming from online votes, and being a bit behind in the polls I posted an appeal on my family Facebook group. I was greeted by my hyper-religious aunt, and her Christian Love. This was my response.

It doesn’t fully describe the work we do at Filipino Freethinkers, but it’s a start, and it’s what I love most about this group. If you like what we do, you can help us by voting here.

I don’t know if this is much of a public service, since I don’t know if anyone would fall for it, but seeing as how some people can be convinced to give their hard-earned money to buy brand new SUVs for a bunch of rich bishops, I suppose this might serve some purpose and save some gullible people a few bucks.

A while ago I received an email titled “SM CINEMA 10PESO TICKET PROMO” telling me to check my spam folder. It looked like this:

Two things tell me this is bullshit: (1) bad grammar and (2)  the “via smtp.com”. Official releases of big companies tend to have better grammar, and smtp.com is used for “the execution of outbound email delivery for marketing, enterprise and personal applications”. In other words, spam. Also of some concern are the missing space after the period, and the fact that the email is signed “SM CINEMA” instead of the usual “SM Cinema” from the last time I bought tickets online.

I checked my spam folder anyway and found this email waiting:

.. followed by a couple of pictures of the bCode scanner, and then this:

The link in the email will take you to http://smcinemamall.my-webs.org/cinema/1/index.htm, which is obviously bullshit, even though it looks somewhat like the usual BDO merchant gateway you would use if you bought a ticket online.

The dead giveaway that this is bullshit though is the URL. There is no such thing as an SM Cinema Mall, and SM Cinema’s site is hosted at smcinema.com, not the free hosting site my-webs.org.

Click VISA and you’ll be asked for your credit card information, and here is where spam becomes scam. If you’ve entered your credit card information and clicked the tacky “pay” button on the lower right, have your card cancelled immediately. If you’ve figured out that this is a fishing scam, congratulations. You can play along with some bullshit for their bullshit.

The funny part is that they bothered to put a “Verified by VISA” gif to seem more legit.Although I suppose that’s not so funny when you find your credit card maxed out, huh?

Lastly, you’re redirected to a fake SM Cinema login page where, for good measure, they fish for your SM Cinema account as well.  They’re as sloppy as usual, not even bothering to validate that you’ve entered a password.

After you “log on”, you’ll be brought to this page:

Spoiler alert: You Won’t Recive Shit.

Update: I emailed SM Cinema and SMTP.com about the above, and SMTP.com has been really helpful, looking up the account responsible for this and taking care of the issue. SM Cinema has not responded. I can’t find an email address for my-webs.org.

I need to learn to write what I think, quickly and effectively, in a format at least a little bit longer than what Twitter allows. It’s true what they say, after all – Twitter scratches the itch we feel when we need to say something, and as a result we trade depth for brevity. So, at the risk of rambling about random, unrelated things, here’s a first step to trying again, one paragraph at a time.