Filipino professor builds free scam message checker for Filipinos
John Clement S. Escobañez, an IT professor at National University Manila, built a free platform called Scam Ba ‘To? (scambato.org) specifically for that moment. It is free, requires no account, and it works differently from most scam checkers out there.
The OTP Is Not the Problem
Most tools treat certain message features as automatic red flags. OTP present? Flag it. Urgent tone? Flag it. Scam Ba ‘To? skips that logic entirely.
An OTP is fine if you triggered the transaction yourself. The problem is what comes next. A message that asks you to enter that OTP on a different website, forward it to another person, or use it to cancel a transaction you never started, that is what the platform is built to catch. It reads the instruction, not the keyword.
It also does something most tools miss: it separates recognizing an organization from trusting that the message came from that organization. A text can mention BDO or PhilHealth by name and still be a scam. The platform does not let brand recognition count as proof.
Red, Yellow, Green
You paste the message. The platform comes back with one of three ratings. Red means it found dangerous behavior. Yellow means you should verify before doing anything. Green means lower risk based on what it saw, though it is not a guarantee the sender is legitimate.
Every result includes a plain explanation of why it landed where it did. When the platform has verified contact information for the organization mentioned, it points you there directly.
What Is Under the Hood
The platform has 77 Gold verified entities, 648 recognition entities, and 716 organization-intelligence profiles. It ran 48,000 benchmark tests using 16,447 unique messages. Escobañez was clear that those 48,000 are validation cases, not separate real-world scam reports.
Escobañez is affiliated with NU’s College of Computing and Information Technologies, but he developed the project separately from the university. It is independently built.
Bookmark scambato.org. The next suspicious text is not far away.
