Cell phone scams continue

Apr 26, 2015 News

…Digicel customers advised to “be smart”
Guyanese across the country are being defrauded of huge sums of cash as the wave of cell phone scams continue.
One customer, who asked to remain anonymous, told this newspaper that her sister was called early one morning and told that she was the winner of $900,000 from Digicel. The woman said that the person on the other line, a man, indicated that to claim the prize $10,000 in credit needed to be purchased and the number from the cards messaged to a specific number.
In turn, the man said that she would receive two messages; one to confirm that the credit was received and another to provide a code to uplift the prize money. The man, who identified himself as Chris Persaud, also asked for a national identification number.
“As soon as he said that, bells start ringing in my head,” the woman told Kaieteur News.
She said she continued the conversation with the man who subsequently told her to collect her prize money at Digicel’s City Mall location. However, she said, she was certain that it was all a scam.
The woman is one of countless Guyanese who have been approached with something too good to be true. Sometimes the scam is apparent and lucky persons manage to avoid being defrauded. Others are not as fortunate and lose large sums of cash before they can realize what has happened.
When contacted, Digicel’s Public Relations Officer (PRO) Vidya Bijlall-Sanichara said that little can actually be done by the company to tackle the scam artists since the issue does not originate with Digicel. She said that the issue has been one that has been ongoing for quite a while now.
She said, too, that advisories and messages were often sent out to Digicel customers advising them to be wary of scams.
However, she said, despite the repeated warnings customers still fall prey to scams. She said that attacking the issue is difficult as the scam artists would quickly dispose of the SIMs once Digicel is on their trails.
She further explained that the fraudsters would ask for information such as addresses, correct spelling of names and national ID numbers to make the scam seem more legitimate. She added that the process of handling the fraudsters is made difficult by a long process, which includes the involvement of the police.
“We can only advise people to be smart; persons would come in and demand their cash back but there’s nothing that can be done because this wasn’t something that came from Digicel,” Bijlall-Sanichara said.
The Public Relations Officer is positive that Digicel employees are not involved in the scams. “I can safely say that our employees aren’t involved. They know they can be severely reprimanded or even face legal actions,” she said.
Bijlall-Sanichara indicated that she could not give an estimate of how many persons have called in to report scams. She also said that the other local network, GT&T, is also affected.

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Cell phone scams continue

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