Fraudsters devise new tricks; Vomiting, bandaging body parts, bumping into vehicles
They stand by the roadside looking very ill, often carrying innocent children and brandishing fiticious prescriptions from clinics while soliciting for money from sympathetic and unsuspecting victims.
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These are some of the new methods adopted by confidence tricksters to outwit innocent victims around Accra.
Lately, in a desperate bid to win the sympathy of people, these tricksters narrate all sorts of stories to solicit money from good Samaritans under the pretence of going to the hospital.
In order to draw more sympathy, some swaddle themselves in various layers of bandages around their heads, hands and legs to portray that they are recovering from road accidents.
There is a certain woman who operates around the Accra Psychiatric Hospital and the National Theatre. She always displays a prescription form to both drivers and pedestrians.
She sometimes claims her baby is seriously sick and has been admitted but she does not have money to buy the medications prescribed.
This reporter has been monitoring a man who always holds a shoe-shine box on the Graphic Road.
He always starts vomiting the moment he sees someone going to the Stanbic and GCB ATMs.
This guy always has his box in one hand and a sachet of water in the other.
Apparently, he has some yellow substance which he pours into his mouth. He adds the water as soon as he sees you withdrawing the money.
He tries to cough hard to attract you and then vomits the yellow substance to deceive you that he has severe malaria but does not have money to go to hospital or eat.
“Having seen him on three occasions plying his ‘trade’, the reporter drew the attention of security men around but the “sick” shoe-shine man showed a clean pair of heels. A trickster indeed.
Around the Opeibea House and Airport City, there are a group of young boys who are good at distracting drivers and passengers who have not rolled up their windows and snatching their phones or picking their bags from car seats or the laps of victims who are suitably distracted.
Recently, one of the traffic wardens around Airport City narrated how one of the young boys snatched an iPhone from a woman who was sitting in the passenger seat in front of a private car and was busily engrossed in social media.
“The phone owner said the boy told him someone was waving at her in another car. When she tried to see who the person was, the boy took her phone and ran away.
“He used a path that goes into the DVLA yard,” the traffic warden narrated.
Around Atomic Junction, Ritz Junction and the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA) is a man who is fond of hitting himself against oncoming cars and pretending he has been seriously injured in the “collision.”
He then demands money from the targeted drivers to go for treatment.
When a driver insists on sending him to the hospital for treatment, he gets angry and vanishes from the scene.
Recently, the incident of a confidence trickster in Accra went viral on social media when he defrauded a school boy to the tune of GH¢5,000 by hanging around a bank and pretending to be a staff member who could help with his transaction.
The trickster told him he was also an old student of the boy’s school and that got the innocent boy excited.
He convinced the boy that he could help him go through the process and directed him to sit on a sofa and wait for him. He outsmarted the young boy and bolted with the money.