They try to sell you fake rejuvenating hair-growth or whitening medicines and chemicals.
RAWALPINDI CANTT: When intelligent people find no avenues to be honestly employed, they take to daytime heists, break-ins, theft of vehicles and wallet and mobile phone snatching. The timid and less ambitious embark upon a lifelong career of lucrative frauds. Often, to hoodwink gullible people, they warp new information technology to their advantage.
There is no helpline at hand if you want to report a fraud. However, the Federal Bureau of Investigation provides online help against phishing and other innovative frauds. But this service does little to check crime. It is unfortunate that this country provides no mechanism to catch the fraudulent or alert people about frauds.
Common frauds prevalent these days are: the Ponzi scheme, profit clicking, capital clicking ZeekRewards, Probux, JustBeenPaid and Online Freelancers. Another type of fraud is a call from a certain cell phone office asking you to collect a certain amount of money as your phone number has won some phantom lucky draw. Often, one spots well-dressed representatives from marketing companies giving free lottery cards and fake tickets to passers-by. To emboss their credibility, they stand beside a parked van along a busy road. The uncanny recipient of the card finds himself bound to pay the price of the ‘durable consumer item’ he ‘wins’. If he has no money in his pocket, the card giver sends his henchmen to his home to get the money.
Several types of frauds abound. Sometimes they give you a lift in a car and then pick your pocket. They try to sell you fake rejuvenating hair-growth or whitening medicines and chemicals. Will someone do anything to save the gullible people?
Amjed Jaaved
Published in The Express Tribune, May 16th, 2014.
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