Scam Alert! Watch out for mobile phone fraud
Some of the areas where fraudsters are cashing in currently are duping people through mobile money transfer, short message service (SMS), email and social media platforms.
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Scammers create SMS competitions or trivia scams to trick you into paying extremely high call or text rates when replying to an unsolicited text message on your mobile or smart phone.
How this scam works
An unsolicited text message may invite you to enter a competition for a great prize. You will be required to send a text message back.
You may also receive an email or encounter a pop-up window online asking you to enter your mobile number in order to claim a prize you have supposedly won.
Sometimes these come in the guise of a ‘customer survey’ in which you are prompted to provide your mobile number.
Alternatively, the message may invite you to take part in a trivia contest with a great prize on offer if you answer a certain number of questions correctly.
The first lot of questions will be very easy – scammers do this intentionally to encourage you to keep playing.
However, the last one or two questions that you need to answer to claim your ‘prize’ could be very difficult or impossible to answer correctly and may even require you to guess a random number.
The scammers make money by charging extremely high rates for the text messages you send and any further messages they send to you.
There are others who also call your number and trick you into believing that they are calling from abroad. They tell you that they have mistakenly transferred some money and goods with your mobile number.
In order to convince you, they give you another number of the supposed money transfer agent to call and verify if, indeed, you have a parcel bearing your name with the agent.
Those who fall for this trick end up transferring the cedi equivalent of the money transfered to the initial person who called from abroad, with the intention of retrieving the money with the agent with some interest.
Unfortunately, the scammers vanish after they succeed.
Experiences
Mr Steve Baah is 61 years and lives alone in retirement. Not long after his wife’s death, he received an unexpected call about an investment opportunity.
The callers were very professional in their approach and seemed to have excellent knowledge of investment matters.
They answered all of Steve’s questions and their initial contact was followed up with calls from supposed ‘senior advisors’.
Over the next six months, Mr Baah made a number of transfers to the 'investment professionals', initially starting with $5,000. He was referred to a very professional looking website and set up a login account which showed his money increasing in value as the market ‘went up’.
Confident that the system was working, he invested more money. Overall, Mr Baah, who is into other businesses, sent $150,000.
He only realised that the investment scheme was a scam when the website went down and he could no longer access his account or contact the offshore group by phone.
He then did some research and discovered that the company was fake and not registered, but he was too embarrassed to tell anyone or report it to police.
“I have four children abroad who usually send me money to invest in my business, since I am currently on retirement. However, I fell victim to these scammers and all my hard-earned money is gone. How can I tell them this or even my pastor?” he lamented.
In another case, Madam Grace Appiah, who is a shoe importer, fell victim to some scammers recently.
One afternoon, she received an email which appeared to be from one of her regular suppliers based in China.
Mr Jing’s (fake supplier) email explained that due to a change in their internal finance system, he needed Madam Grace to update their banking details, including a new account number.
She took the email at face value and changed the banking information in her company’s database. A few days later, she made a scheduled payment of $20,000.
Two weeks later, Madam Grace telephoned Mr Jing but he said he had not received payment for the last order and had consequently cancelled shipment.
She told Mr Jing that she had processed the payment personally to make sure it was paid according to the new arrangements.
After some investigation, it became clear that Mr Jing (the original supplier) had not sent any request to update his company’s banking details and that Madam Grace had fallen victim to scammers.
Warning signs
Giving some warning signs about such scams, a Communication Expert, Dr Felix Odartey-Wellington, said sometimes you received a text message which might look like an advertisement, offering you the chance to win a great prize by sending a return text to enter a competition.
According to him, most often, the text message (or advertisement) did not contain all the terms and conditions or an ‘opt out’ to stop receiving more messages.
“Do not respond to text messages or missed calls that come from numbers you don’t recognise,” he said.
The Public Relations Officer of the Criminal Investigations Department of the Ghana Police Service, ASP Joseph Darkwa, warned the public to watch out for people who could defraud them via their mobile phones or on the Internet.
He explained that mostly the perpetrators were faceless and quickly went into hiding after milking their victims.
“There are no shortcuts to wealth. If you receive unsolicited calls or emails, hang up or delete them immediately,” he advised.