A video on YouTube is erroneously claiming that the Office of the Ombudsman filed a case against Marikina Rep. Stella Quimbo for her alleged lavish lifestyle. This is not true.
A YouTube channel published the video on Oct. 9 bearing the spurious headline below. It notably replaced some of the letter Os with zeroes, ostensibly to evade keyword detection.
“KAKAPASOK LANG Paktay na! Stella Quimbo NAKAS0HAN na! Bumaba Pagka-Congressman? Risa Tak0t Quiboloy?
(JUST IN. Oh, no! Stella Quimbo is facing a charge! She stepped down as congresswoman? [Sen.] Risa [Hontiveros] is scared of Quiboloy?)”
The headline is clickbait. The Office of the Ombudsman has not filed any case whatsoever against Quimbo. She has also not stepped down from her position, contrary to another claim in the video’s thumbnail.
The narrator of the 28-minute video only talked about a complaint allegedly lodged at the Office of the Ombudsman by an unidentified citizen about Quimbo’s “alleged extravagant lifestyle.”
According to the Ombudsman’s rules of procedure, anyone can file a complaint at their office and, upon evaluation, it may be dismissed, referred to the proper office or subjected to a preliminary investigation.
The Office of the Ombudsman has not released any statement on what action they are taking regarding the complaint against Quimbo.
The false video continued to circulate this week as Quimbo and BHW Party-list Rep. Angelica Natasha Co jointly filed a complaint before the House Committee on Ethics against Agri Party-list Rep. Wilbert Lee over his “acts of aggression” during a plenary budget deliberation in September.
YouTube channel PINAS NEWS HEADLINES (created on July 24, 2017) published the video, which garnered over 103,000 views and 2,200 online interactions.