I won a R750000 Mercedes sports car this week! I really did…well that is what the sms message on my phone told me. I had won it at a German motor show that I never attended and to collect my prize all I had to do was call a number in Kenya!
I had a cousin and his entire family killed in the Twin Towers bombing in 2001.He had left me his entire fortune and to collect that I needed to urgently contact a number in Nigeria and on payment of a “fee” the money would be transferred into my account. Number 419 is the Nigerian law that prohibits this type of scam!
I usually delete these emails without reading them, but every now and then I wonder if it might be true that I have won £7m in some Lotto to which I never bought a ticket. There is always that flicker of hope…
So, truth be told, I don’t really have the car or my non-existent cousins money.
However there are many people both locally and internationally who are caught in theses sort of scams, and they usually do not end well for the participants. Trust me, there are no free lunches.
How many of us have given money to women with crying babies saying that they need money for nappies or milk?
Or the breathless young woman in a car park to ask for me help with petrol money, and she did this twice on the same day!
A man who said that he had just been released from prison and needed train money to get home to Germiston stopped me in downtown Jozi. The next day he accosted me again and told me the very same story…when I asked him if he had spent the previous night in goal he became abusive. Do these con-artists not remember whom they approach?
But in a perverse way you have to admire the capacity they have to invent stories.
There was a woman in the Northern suburbs who would be seen plying her “craft” in mall car parks however once she saw that she had been mentioned in the local papers, she disappeared and then re-surfaced a few months later in a different suburb with a slightly altered story.
You have to admire her tenacity.
Can this untapped creativity not be harnessed and used for the betterment of the people concerned?
I recently noticed a harassed looking man at a robot with a broken fan belt in one hand and a set of car keys in the other. Using these ‘props’ to explain his predicament he tried to elicit money from motorists.
I did feel sorry for him the first time I saw him, but when he was there the second day I realized what his scam was.
These people and their stories are part of the rich tapestry of Jozi.
Applaud their ingenuity, but remember… If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck!
No comments:
Post a Comment