[COL] Got scammed by a Colombian escort site “prepagos.com” – warning and how the scam works
Hi everyone, I wanted to share an experience I had a while ago with a Colombian escort website called “prepagos[dot]com” (writing it like that to avoid linking directly). This is basically a warning and an explanation of how their scam works.
I was browsing profiles and contacting some girls by WhatsApp to ask about prices when they didn’t have them listed on the site. Some of them later told me I had “hurt” them because, according to them, my message caused the page to “block” their profile until a client payment was made.
Then someone claiming to be an “administrator” from the site called me (it was clearly a fake profile/identity). They told me I had harmed a random number of women and tried to make me feel guilty. They even sent an ID photo of some person (who was probably also a victim at some point) to gain my trust.
Their main trick is the so‑called “simulated payment.” They say that if you send a payment, they will immediately refund you and unlock everything. But if you pay once, they keep inventing more fees and “requirements” so you have to keep sending money. When you finally refuse to pay more, they might hang up, insult you, or mock you for being “naive.”
The only real “solution” is to stop responding, hang up, block and report their numbers on WhatsApp, and move on. This year alone, in about four months, around eight different people contacted me asking about this same issue because they found old comments of mine talking about it. My answer is always:
- If you haven’t paid: ignore them, you’ll be fine.
- If you already paid: I’m really sorry, that money is gone.
I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know much about how police reports work. One person I spoke to told me that the police can maybe get those phone lines suspended if you’re lucky, but deeper investigations take more money and time than what the scam is “worth.” Another person told me that many of these scams are run from prisons, and that the justice system is too weak to properly stop them.
In my opinion, that site has a lot of problems: no real verification of profiles, photos obviously taken from Google or other sites, and basically zero security for users. It looks like they just want to make money from ads and don’t care about anything else.
If anyone here has gone through something similar or knows better legal/technical ways to deal with this, I’d appreciate any advice. Mainly I just hope fewer people fall for this scam.