You never want to hear about scams, as they are often a way to showcase how low the human race is in how it treats one another. But in recent times, we’ve been seeing just how far people are willing to go to try and get people’s money. Specifically, a string of recent events have been focused on bringing people to certain places based on their childhoods or nostalgia, being sold as “something special you have to experience,” and then…it’s nothing like it was promised. Sadly, the Pokemon can now have its name attached to that kind of scam.
The event happened in the Philippines, where a convention called “PokeVerse” had been advertised as a “premiere expo” where franchise fans could come together, play games, have fun, and even meet people connected to the franchise. However, when people showed up to the “experience,” they were met with a hollow shell that gave “hollow shells” a bad name.
One of the people who went there made a massive Twitter thread about the event, and you can see below just one picture of how lame the event was:
It’s sad to have the Pokemon name attached to such an event, and yet, when you recall a certain Willy Wonka “experience” that also happened not long ago, we can honestly say it’s not that surprising that someone tried to do this…and succeeded.
In some ways, this is one of the easiest scams to pull off. All you have to do is make some art, which can be done with AI as the Willy Wonka experience showed, to help promote things and build up hype, then name a bunch of things that people can do to establish connections with the fandom. Once you collect their money, you run, and you never have to think about it again.
Plus, if you’re in a place like the Philippines, where events like this likely don’t happen that often, you can bank off of people’s eagerness to “finally have an experience like this near them,” and they’ll be even MORE eager to throw money at the event so they can “create memories” that they might not be able to make again for a long time.
Sadly, memories were created at this “PokeVerse Event,” but not good ones. And because of the nature of this scam, it might be really hard to take action against those that scammed them. We send sincere apologies to everyone who was let down by his event.
