CONSUMER CONCERNS….DON’T BE ROBBED BY FOREIGN SCAMMERS

May 29, 2016 News

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PAT DIAL
A year ago this column carried what was in effect an advisory to Guyanese not to be taken in by foreign scams. These scams seem to have had an upsurge in recent months and within the last four weeks two consumers have related to us how they were fleeced of several hundred U.S. dollars by these scams.
Most sufferers are too ashamed to admit or divulge that they were robbed and tend to suffer in silence. A few others, however, seem to have fallen completely under the spell of these confidence tricksters and willingly obey their command that they should not tell anyone of their dealings with them. These victims have continued to transfer their hard-earned money causing themselves and families in great deprivation.
We have known one family who became victims of the West African scams, lost their house and have been investigated by t he FBI.
Many of these confidence tricksters operate from West African countries, in particular Nigeria where they have schools teaching how to perfect these scams. Many of these scammers are linked with terrorist groups in the Islamic world who retain them at handsome fees as fund-raisers.
With the advances of modern technology, these terrorist groups and their financiers are kept under surveillance by the U.S. and other countries’ Intelligence Services and the unwitting Guyanese scam victim finds himself in unforeseen and unexpected danger by being in contact with such scammers.
We will very briefly mention the operation of two of the most common of these scams. The first of these is the offer of tickets for the world’s richest lotteries such as the Spanish El Gordo which pays scores of millions of dollars to winners. And the other common scam is for the trickster claiming that he is, or in contact with a senior Government official or a Minister of Government or even an Oil Executive of, say Nigeria, who has got his hands on millions of dollars and wishes to put it away in a foreign bank account owned by someone else.
He urgently wishes to have your bank account’s number and other data about it and for doing the service of having the money transferred to your account, you will be rewarded with a commission of 30 or 40% of the value of the deposit. There are other scams of this type where the prospective victim is on the verge of receiving large sums of money if he urgently sends on money to cover preliminary expenses.
Most of the lottery scams seem to operate from Western Europe and Australia. The trickster would have obtained your home address by some means and in their covering letter they address you by your first name telling you that you are one of a very select group in Guyana to whom they would be offering their services and tickets. Many of them also carry copies of a newspaper report that you have won millions. T
here is always an assurance that you will receive your winnings of several hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions at your home three days after results. The bottom line is that you must immediately send them sums of money to get the tickets. At the next mail, you will be told that you missed the jackpot by one number and your hopes will be kept high so that you could keep on sending money.
The Nigerian and other West African scams are to know of your bank accounts so that they could steal all your money. They are also designed to keep collecting money from you. Their e-mails are all untraceable and usually disappear from the computer monitors in a few minutes. Once one is caught in the net of these tricksters, it is difficult for the majority of victims to free themselves until they have been pauperized.
As an example, there is the story which was reported in the world news and in the local press a few years ago of a Brazilian banking clerk who was caught in one of these scams and transmitted many millions of the bank’s funds to these tricksters.
The most effective way of protecting one’s self and dealing with these scammers is to immediately destroy any mail you may receive from them without reading them and quickly erase any e-mails from them. Do not have any contact with them. And also be guided by the ancient and well-tried wisdom of the following two adages: “You can never have something for nothing” and “A fool and his money are soon parted”.
If one desires to occasionally indulge in a game of chance, there is the local lottery. If winning on the lottery is due to one’s luck and to pure chance without any human manipulation, then there is no need to buy more than one ticket since if it is your luck to win, then one ticket will be sufficient.
Indeed, the lottery company is perfectly aware of this as is expressed in their widely disseminated slogan: ‘A ticket a day could make you rich to-day’; they never recommended five or ten tickets!

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