After nearly becoming the victim of a con artist, an Alexander Village woman is trying to sensitize other persons before they too fall prey to the latest wave of cell phone scams.
According to the woman, who did not want to be identified, a few months ago her husband received a phone call from someone who said he was employed at the phone company and proceeded to tell him that he needs to purchase $27,000 in telephone credit. “The guy ask him where he has to go to buy the credit and my husband tell him is not far, is down the road,” she said.
“So when I heard my husband talking I took the phone away from him and I said ‘Hello’ and I asked the person who they would like to speak to and the guy told me that he would like to speak to the guy who was speaking just now and I just hang up the phone,” the woman recalled.
She is one of many who are being contacted by the scam artistes, while she was lucky to not have actually been conned, others are not fortunate. To this end, the woman said that “it is good to let other people know what is going on.”
She said last week she was contacted by someone on a private number purporting to be a GTT employee, “on my Digicel phone and he said ‘who deh home’. I asked him who he would like to speak to and he stammered a little and called a name and I cut off the phone. Like when he find out he wasn’t talking to anyone small he didn’t want to continue,” the woman said.
It was only last week that Stabroek News had reported that a 14-year-old was conned into handing over her family valuables after her grandmother received a call from someone purporting to be employed at GTT.
The caller who spoke to the teenager’s grandmother informed her that the company had an ongoing game and winners would be given iPhones. The caller then enquired if the woman had young relatives between the ages of 12 and 15.
After replying in the affirmative, she gave the child her phone. The child was asked a series of questions then told she was chosen to win an iPhone if she completed several tasks.
These included taking all her family’s jewellery—worth some $200,000—putting same into a black plastic bag and taking it to the seawall, where the scammers collected it and drove away.
It was after the reading the report of the 14-year-old in this newspaper that the woman said she wanted to let others know that it was not the first time such an incident had occurred. “I want people to be aware,” the woman said.
Meanwhile, this newspaper was also made to understand that this is the third such incident to have occurred within a matter of weeks.
Both GTT and Digicel have in the past warned customers not to give credit or cash to anyone calling, purporting to be a staff member and asking for same. The two companies, which regularly conduct promotions, said none of their promotions have ever or will ever take such a format.
