One Step Ahead

With each day that passes, these scammers keep looking for new ways to defraud innocent people. Earlier today, a lady who runs a POS machine business (her job is basically like an ATM; you send her money and she gives you physical cash) was taken into the station today by the police for questioning.

_{photo by Bermix Studio}

Apparently what happened is a case that any one of us easily could have fallen victim to. According to the few things I heard, someone had defrauded a lady by lying to her that a sibling of hers was at the hospital and that they needed money for treatment or the sibling could die at any minute.

Without calling the sibling to confirm, the lady had immediately asked the caller to send them their account details so that the hospital could start treatment, not knowing that the call was a scam call. According to the lady, what sold it for her was the fact that she spoke to the doctor on the phone and it all sounded legit.

If you're wondering how any of this connects to the POS lady down my street, well, the scammers were smart enough not to send the lady getting scammed their account number, because they knew it would have their details on it and that could easily be traced by the police, so what they did instead was they went to the POS lady's shop and told her that they were expecting money from someone.

So they sent the lady getting scammed the POS lady's account number, and when the lady getting scammed sent the money to her, the POS lady gave them cash, and they left, never to be seen again.

When the lady getting scammed eventually noticed that she had been scammed, she contacted the police, and the rest was history, or at least that was the story I was told. That entire story just goes to show us how smart these people have gotten, and how every day we wake up, we have to make sure we're one step ahead of them all the time or become a victim to one of these scams.