Yini Chua never expected to become one of the cautionary tales she’d only read about. While walking through Manila, she was approached by three women who claimed to be tourists from Cebu, in town to celebrate a birthday. They were warm, chatty, and generous—paying for lunch and public transport, giving her a local nickname, and weaving a believable story of hospitality and cultural norms. At some point during the outing, Yini was handed ice cream—what she later suspected had been laced with Ativan, a sedative commonly used in tourist-targeted scams.
Soon after, she found herself ushered into a dark, unfamiliar room under the pretense of waiting for a ride to a nearby volcano. Her memory from that point fractured: flashes of a meal, Red Horse beer, a strange sense of disorientation, and then a taxi ride back to her hostel. She vomited outside the building, realizing something was terribly wrong. In total, she had lost around S$800 and several hours of memory. Her electronics were left behind, perhaps a calculated decision by the scammers. The psychological toll, however, far outweighed the financial loss. “Losing parts of my memory,” she later wrote, “feels almost as if a piece of myself was forcibly taken away.”
