Saturday, April 25, 2009

Being Conned

Yesterday on the way from my office to the HQ, I was stopped by a bunch of young guys at the Masjid Jamek LRT station.

"Miss. Miss! I give you free Jusco voucher! Just give me 5 minutes to explain!"



Curious, I stopped. Jusco? As in Jaya Jusco employing people to stand at train stations giving out free vouchers? Sensing a con job coming up, I waited for him to proceed.

"Miss, have you seen this ad in Jusco? In the newspaper?" He pulls up an advertisement from a Chinese newspaper. I reply a negative. He then proceeded to say that the sealed voucher he is giving me will contain a colour which will indicate how much discount I would get for purchases at Jusco.

Asking me to write my name (and only my name), I played along and ripped the voucher open.

Immediately, his colleague joined him and both exclaimed loudly, "Miss!! Wow!! You are very lucky! Only 200 people can win this type of voucher! You will win an electrical item shown here and the grey circle (on the left) has a hidden number. You go to one of the four suppliers (which I have never heard of), claim your electrical gift and scan the grey circle. You could win a trip to Bali, Paris etc depending on what number it is!"

Ah ha. I have heard of this scam. Think I was born yesterday?

"Call this number now (a handphone number, nevertheless) and speak to Ms Lim to claim your prize"

Thank goodness I was late for a meeting so I made my excuses and left quickly. I kept the "voucher" as a conversation piece. The whole procedure was so fishy, you could smell it a mile away. But it's sad that some people fall for this and loose their hard earned money for these scams.

2 comments:

Grace said...

What was the scam? You have to pay something right in order to claim the price?

jo said...

yeah. apparently they will give you the electrical prize you won and then for the airticket to goodness knows where, you'd have to put a downpayment which costs more than the electrical item to "secure" your plane ticket.

something like that.