Can Kapa investors recover their money?

By Joe Pallugna .

INVESTMENT scams are nothing new. They are as old as human financial history.

Famous of all infamous scams was the Ponzi scam perpetrated by Charles Ponzi who invited a slew of people in the U.S. in the year 1920s and succeeded in getting their investments for a promise of huge interests. Thousands fell victim of the scheme and Ponzi was later arrested.

On July 19, 2020, Joel Apolinario was arrested in a remote community in Lingig, Surigao del Sur in the southern Philippines. He is the prime architect and the primary beneficiary of the Kabus Padatoon (Kapa)financial scam. Upon his arrest, a cache of firearms was recovered after a firefight with some 200 policemen and intelligence operatives. Two of Apolinario’s many bodyguards were killed in the ensuing shootout. That was the beginning of the end of Kapa. But that will not be the last of these financial investment scams.

Many people are easily lured by scammers. Not only on internet offerings of cheap electric cars and scooters which are never delivered, house decors with too small sizes than those in the pictures, misrepresented videos which are far true from the real items delivered or of different quality from those offered, but most notably double your money in three months.

Long before Kapa we had the Legacy investment scams which victimized hundreds of thousands from Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao until it crashed in 2009, and we had Aman Futures based in Dipolog City in 2012, and Coco Rasuman’s cars pyramid scam earlier in 2012, the gold bars of Emgoldex in 2015, and the more recent Freeman Trader’s Club headed by Mark Freeman and the Bitcoin series of scams in 2018. And people never learn the lessons of scamming history.

They take all forms of presentations like the credit card collections of Legacy, the electronic bitcoins with ATM machines, chickens growing in binary numbers, cars reselling schemes of Rasuman, and the “religious brotherly donations” coming from the investors of Apolinario. They all come under different guises.

Mayor Celso delos Angeles led the Legacy scam, the respected Rasuman family of Coco Rasuman started the car investment scheme, Mark Freeman used pastors of credible born-again churches, the wife of a respected mayor in western Mindanao was proferred as the head of the Aman fraud, and now a self-proclaimed Pastor Joel Apolinario engineered the Kapa scam. Nothing else is new but people still fall prey to these get-rich-easy ploys not for the reason that these people are poor but because of the innate greed for riches without working hard for it.

Comes now the common question. Can the investors of Pastor Joel Apolinario recover their money now that Apolinario was arrested?

The simple and easy answer is, No!

The “investors” are just too many and their money was long gone with the houses and cars of Apolinario, his family’s businesses in gasoline stations, farmlands, apartments and condominiums, and the financial networks of scammers below him.

The people’s money can never be recovered. The only consolation left is the satisfaction that Apolinario will rot in jail, or as Celso delos Angeles’ fate may have it, he died in prison with cancer.

The money of the victims of all these scams was never recovered. They also have themselves to blame. They wanted to get rich quick, they also became poorer quicker.

And as the court hearings of Apolinario will unfold in the coming months and years, people will begin to realize that they will never be able to recover their money. Such is the nature and consequence of financial fraud.

The harsh reality will soon kick in. Their money is gone. The next scam will come and many more will be victimized. For, sadly, such is the nature of humans. They are always and ever ready victims of scammers. Just ask the internet buyers. They just smile and continue to click on the next internet offer.