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Con artist targets “barrel” recipients
Christmas is a time when everyone looks forward for their barrels and boxes from their overseas relatives. Well, this year, a con man has surfaced and he has been targeting “barrel lovers” throughout the country.
He sometimes goes by the name Andre and, at times, Ryan, while pretending to be a worker attached to the Laparkan Shipping Company, doing door-to-door services. His focus is on aged persons in rural areas, and he is targeting mostly women.
For the past four months, four persons have turned up at the shipping company, claiming that they paid the con artist money for barrels that were never delivered to them.
Barrel
“Apparently it is someone who knows the victims. He is calling people who have relatives overseas, who they haven’t heard from in a long time. He calls them and says, ‘hey, you don’t remember my voice? This is your cousin from Canada’ and he tells them that he wants to send a barrel for them,” Laparkan’s Custom Service Manager Debra Blackmore explained.
She added that the con artist would convince these persons during the telephone conversation that he is actually their relative.
A few days after the telephone call, “a man” would again call his victim and tell them that they have to pay the shipping company for the delivery of the barrels.
“The person would request his victim to meet him at a location to make the payment. When they pay the man, he would tell them to check with Laparkan for their barrels,” Blackmore said.
The confidence trickster collected in excess of $130,000 for barrels from a woman in Corentyne, Berbice.
“Any transaction will be done at Laparkan’s office. Door-to-door service people will get an official receipt,” Blackmore stressed.
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