Deceived

I AM really sorry for my SoCCSKSarGen Blogger friends if I was not able to attend our scheduled meetup because something really unexpected happened.

A man who once came to our church for help last year returned this morning. He spoke in the pulpit and told us that he is paying back the church by donating musical instruments like a drum set, keyboard, guitars, and also chairs and several sacks of rice.

Sweet isn’t it? Until we realized it was deception.

One of Leann Rimes’ song has the line, “Shame on you if you fool me once, shame on me if you fool me twice.”

Last year, the church members contributed for his fare to Ipil, Zamboanga because he made us believe in his well-crafted ploy, which was a very sad story of a changed ex-convict who is looking for his wife and eager to start a new life.

Today, this man who calls himself Captain Panes of the Philippine Army fooled us for the second time. Because his story was convincing, we volunteered to help him haul the things he told us he would donate to our church.

He brought us (there were eight of us, including a pastor and an ex-military man) to Labangal, General Santos City, where he said we would pay a certain Mrs. Tobias who shouldered the freight of the instruments he was to donate. And there the swindling happened. He isolated me from group because he asked me to escort him to the house of his friend. That gave him the chance to get my phone ( my new and hard-earned phone) and some cash from our church’s fund.

This man victimized other churches as well. The latest being our church, Alabel Alliance Church and Lagao Alliance Church, yesterday.

We already reported this to the police and we also warned other church leaders about this man and his modus operandi.

It was a lesson learned the hard way.