Watch Before Leaping

Being scammed is a product of one of two things, it either you’re ignorant or you’re greedy, you may be wondering why, now the ignorance aspect comes with not knowing personal details you should or shouldn’t share with people who claims they need them to help you such as the card verification value code at the back of your debit card or sharing the one-time password sent to your phone for verification for an online transaction or your BVN. these are detail the bank customer service will never ask from you, while for the Greed my parents always told me that if something sounds too good to be true then there is a great possibility it isn’t.

I once had a little experience with one of this internet fraudsters, I don’t know how but it must have been from one of the pages where I dropped my number for airtime giveaways, oh please know where you share your contacts to/on especially the ones linked to your bank, well I got a call from a man who sounded like he was in his late 20s saying I had won 30,000 naira and there were certain procedures/ criteria’s that needed to be met before I claimed my reward, I won’t lie I got a bit excited but thankfully I asked if he could give me 20minutes to round up the task I was carrying out, I actually hate multi-tasking because you’ll end up either messing up both task or you would get an average outcome from both so I tend to handle one task at a time in other to get 100% outcome.

After 30minutes I got a call from the same line asking me if I was ready, by this time I was done and ready to receive 30k of money I did not work for and I bet we all know the feeling of spending money we put little or no efforts in making , I was already planning to satisfy my cravings for goat meat pepper soup and rice with a very chilled sweating bottle of PEPSI 😁, I immediately snapped out of my thoughts of having those cravings when I heard him say I would receive a text and share the code to him once I received it, you see the thing about this OTP(one time password) Is that it has a specific amount of time before it becomes invalid and would need to be regenerated. they usually will tell you to stay on the line so that you can read it out for them, I opened the text sent to me and read the content carefully where it indicated it was for the purpose to reset a password and shouldn’t be shared if it wasn’t generated by me.

This is why it is important to go through certain information thoroughly, seeing this I immediately came to the realization that this was a fraudster probably trying to hack my social media or any other account as it wasn’t really indicating what app or password it was resetting. as a sharp naija boy I made up numbers and called to him with the intentions of wasting his time and airtime he used in communicating with him, he tried resending the code severally and I would repeating random numbers where he would enter and receive a notification that it was incorrect, after multiple tries, he finally caught up with what I was doing and began raining curse words on me while I laughed, at least I played the player and was thankful for my keen observation. A friendly reminder please know the information you share to people, you may see them as mere numbers but those numbers have a lot to do with the security of your accounts and funds.

Thanks for reading and I hope you’ve learned a thing or two from my experience

This is in response to the Digi-Prompt 012

📝 Caught in a Scam or Staying Safe?

Posted Using InLeo Alpha