One day, I was in the office concentrating on work when I received a text message saying, “Dear Parent, I am a teacher and your child has just been rushed to the hospital; please send Sh5,000 to this number to cater for hospital bills.”
Yes, I have a child in school, a boy for that matter, and a football fanatic.
So, yes, I panicked. And I imagined the worst.
I called the number from which the text came, and the sender answered the call.
Me: Hello, how badly is he injured, and which hospital have you taken him to?
Sender: He has broken his leg, and we have taken him to the general hospital. Please send money urgently so he can get an X-ray done and plastered by the time you get here.
Yes, there is a general hospital in my town.
I hurriedly hopped on a motorcycle to the hospital, and called the number again at the gate to find out where exactly they were. When the person heard that I was already at the hospital, he disconnected the call and switched off the number.
I frantically scrolled through my phonebook and found the school receptionist’s number. And when I asked her about my son, she was shocked as she was not aware of any pupil taken to any hospital. She personally went to my son’s class to confirm, and found him at his desk.
And that is when it hit me; I was almost conned!
With technology taking up the better part of our lives, fraudsters are also looking for different ways to try to make money. They prey on their victims’ emotions, worst fears, or greatest desires.
They feed you a string of lies, until you fall into their trap.
And, going by the number of stories I have seen on con games, it seems most victims only realise they have been scammed long after the cons have made a killing. And it is usually too late to salvage the situation.
It may be important to have some knowledge of how fraudsters operate, especially those who operate online in this era of technology, in order to escape their traps.
According to the Kaspersky resource centre, there are several ways in which fraudsters target their victims. Here are three common ones:
Sometimes, while using your mobile phone, virus scams can give you false alerts that claim a presence of a virus on your phone. Or when browsing your phone’s web pages, a page appears with this kind of alert, saying that a scan of your phone has revealed a virus infection, urging you to take immediate action. The scam then gets you to download an ‘anti-virus’ app that is malware or spyware. Once the malicious code is in your smartphone, scammers can hijack your phone or infect other devices.
This involves calls that urge you to take action, normally by calling you or leaving a voicemail.
It involves scammers trying to impersonate an authentic person or organisation to gain your trust. They may pose as part of an official company or government service, convincing you that you must provide personal information or money.
These scams usually try to get you to act during phone calls, making you feel a sense of urgency in doing the action to avoid a bad consequence. They pile pressure on you to pay or share information on the call itself, rather than ask you to make a follow-up after they have hung up.
By causing you to act out of fear, they hope you’ll react by giving them what they want.
These calls come from an unknown number that only rings once, to get you to call back. This scam works because fraudsters are usually betting that curiosity will override your critical judgment. Here’s the scam though: you get charged fees when you make the call, and the scammer profits. These calls tend to be from an international area code, which is part of how they cause the fees.
