(Un)common Sense by James Veloso
(Un)Common Sense

Damn those pranksters!

Apr 15, 2021, 10:00 PM
James Veloso

James Veloso

Writer/Columnist

I WOULD like to call out those no-good SOBs who are reportedly playing tricks on delivery guys who brave both the weather and the pandemic to bring food and services to people who were forced inside their homes.

Hardly a week goes by now without reports of food delivery personnel bringing food to a certain place, only to find out that no one inside the residence had placed an order.

In some cases, multiple orders going up to thousands of pesos were sometimes sent to a single house.

If not for some residents taking pity on them by buying the food themselves, I’m sure these delivery boys would have a very hard time explaining to their bosses that they have been pranked.

-o0o-

The worse thing is, the pranksters are now going beyond tricking food deliveries.

Last week, firefighters in San Juan City rushed out to a call of a fire in Barangay Batis – only to find out that there’s no fire in the area.

That prank call has sparked outrage among netizens, and for good reason.

Taxpayers’ money has been wasted – and what if there’s an actual fire somewhere else that the firemen were unable to respond to because of that prank call?

Unfortunately, it looks like pranksters have had a field day tricking people over the phone lines, even before the pandemic.

Data from the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) showed that that hotline received over 2.5 million prank calls in 2019 alone.

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Under Presidential Decree, No. 1727 prank callers can be punished with imprisonment of not more than five years, or a fine of not more than P40,000 or both at the discretion of the court having jurisdiction over the offense.

Unfortunately, these pranksters go to extreme lengths to cover their tracks.

Cellphone SIM cards are still over-the-counter, despite measures now in Congress for SIM card registration.

Admittedly, we still don’t have the capability to trace calls like those in the United States and in other more developed countries.

Here in the Philippines, using cellular phones to disguise identities and evade detection by authorities has become a very fine art.

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What I worry now is that these pranksters could take advantage of the pandemic and wreak havoc with fake Covid-19 reports.

They could just as easily cause panic among residents by saying there’s an active Covid-19 case in their barangays.

Let’s face it: our frontliners – medical and business – are now getting exhausted as Covid-19 cases continue to spike.

They still have to perform their duties amid the pandemic. To paraphrase a quote by Chinese leader Mao Zedong, they now “hold half of the sky,” trying to halt the spread of the virus while at the same time ensuring that the economy still keeps running.

There’s a special place in hell for those pranksters who unnecessarily cause even more pain and hardship to those who are now overburdened by the pandemic.


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