If you’ve been following us for awhile I’m sure you will find this post rather ODD. I have to admit we don’t write and share about fake news however, this supposed “news” have hit me harder than normal simply because I for one have had one of the darkest days of my life because of what North American immigration officers told me was simply “bad advice”.
Now, you might think that bad advice I got was from the internet or social media (the place where we now mostly get our information on just about anything – from “cure for the common cold” to you know? Immigration advice?
However, this wasn’t my case at all back in 2009. I actually went to that North American consul based in Cebu and got the said bad advice directly from this supposed person of authority.
As a result, I brought upon one of the most shameful experiences a child could do to a parent who values his name very highly and am forever sorry for it. That along with half a million pesos in debt, and of course 6 months of nightmares and diarrhea.
I’m sure most people would like to label such an experience as “depression” but as I’ve always been saying, with 500K in debt, I was TOO POOR TO AFFORD DEPRESSION!
Going back to the title, this outright wrong information (or TITLEs of articles and posts) has now been shared about 5,000 times in Facebook as you can see below:
You might think this only happens in Facebook where most bloggers/influencers/pages with no stringent (if any) editorial guidelines are being practiced as opposed to the more established traditional media but a quick Google search using the same search term proves that wrong quite easily as you can see below:
A little digging further, even basing from the snippet found on the screenshot above alone and you will clearly see that MSN’s supposed “source” is from a local blog website that is most likely a part of their “Advertising Network”, meaning supposed source’s content can be shown on Microsoft run websites where their ads can be shown to visitors given the source a portion of the income generated from it. More on this here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ad-monetization-platform
Definitely the right question to ask especially in this day and age where the line between traditional media (with supposed stringent editorial guidelines) and the more “free flowing whoever gets to post first” world of blogging and online publishing is disappearing faster than the producers of Fast and Furious can make another sequel.
As what the embassy of that North American country told me on my earlier story, “Only ask immigration questions through them” and nobody else. Not EVEN their consul whose contact details is found on their official embassy website!
In this case, here’s the link to the official statement of the Korean embassy: http://overseas.mofa.go.kr/ph-en/brd/m_20312/view.do?seq=24
In it you will clearly see the title doesn’t even say anything about South Korea being VISA FREE. Full text below:
All that said, I sincerely hope you haven’t booked the next seat sale to Seoul or Incheon just yet or worst, I hope you are not going to have to go through the “life changing” immigration experience I had to go through because of BAD ADVICE.
