CRIME, CON MEN & SCAMMERS

CRIME, CON MEN & SCAMSTERS

I recently was in conversation with a pal where he was telling how his prime land got occupied by some slum dwellers. And now he has to run from pillar to post to get them evacuated. It’s a painful experience he had to undergo where he is rendered helpless against organized gang.. Modus operandi is simple, a gang leader of slum dweller occupies land and refuses to budge till some amount is paid. Normal people are no rowdies who can get them kicked out. Normally we pay tens of lakhs to buy land/house yet fail to secure it by perimeter fencing or get check antecedents of buyer and documents by hiring lawyer/engineer. As loan officer in government bank I get to see how easily builders/developers/promoters fool buyers.  Quite often we are like “penny wise pound foolish”. We spend 50 lakhs to buy property ,yet feel stingy to spend 5000/- on lawyer/engineer to get property inspected. Rather we depend on Bank or Builder to provide for such facility. My landlord trusted his property to care takers and seldom bothered to inspect his own properties and one fine day he found that caretaker exploited owner trust and took a loan of a crore on owner property and scooted leaving owner to repay the loan and face court trials. Its your property. It’s your duty to monitor your money/investments/properties but often “Trust” we use often is mere excuse for our laziness.

Humans are so greedy and want to make quick buck with no sweat on their brow. It amazes me how greed can blind people common senses and fall for traps like ponzi, Nigerian scam or similar investment where scamster promises huge returns with minimum investment. One guy I came across invested 5 lakhs in a unknown company which promised him nominated Director post and twice the investments, ie., 10 lakhs. Similar investments were sought from similar gullible people and later renegade the promise. The investor doesn’t even know the company owner nor company operational plans to make money. He just went by promises of double investment promise. Agrigold scam in Andhra Pradesh reflects human greed which was used to scam thousands of investors in crores.

With influx of digital era, scams have gone online. In a day we get hundreds of calls offering money, cheap loans, etc..web-links saying “PM offering free laptop” or “airline giving away free tickets” or worse “you have won 5 million dollars from coco cola company”. I wonder why the hell would any company give away their products for free?. Quite often these links are malware. Delete without even thinking about its contents. Better safe than sorry. These come in ingenious ways. Couple of months back there was mail in my inbox saying that someone signed in my facebook account.  I always keep my FB deactivated. But seeing this, without thinking much I clicked the link , which activated my FB account. Beunknownst to me, it was malware which immediately posted some 40 advertisements in all my friends fb walls. Imagine the headache they faced to delete all 40 advts from their walls at same time cursing why I posted on their wall. Thankfully, it was just an advertisement. It could ve been worse. Nigerian scam has become popular these days. I used to laugh and wonder how anyone can fall such silly trap. But newspapers scream new victims every day unfortunately.

But that doesn’t stop there. We hear now a days scamsters targeting their victims through matrimonial sites. Scamster lures his/her victim by winning their trust and later dupes gold or money. One of my acquaint lost whooping 30 lakhs  to online romeo scamster who wooed her by promising some business plan, love, and high profits. And one foreigner was fooled by online lover with picture of ashwariya rai. Imagine police amusement when foreigner came to India and showed her photo? No where I am talking about highlevel scams . I am speaking about scams that middle class fall on daily basis. All these scams mentioned above are ones I saw firsthand.

In most of cases , people fall to scams due many reasons such as foolishness, lack of knowledge, laziness…but most importantly GREED. People are so greedy that they want their money to turn gold overnight. There is nothing wrong in being greedy but expecting quick overnight results is. Nothing wrong in desire to get rich. For that one should be ready to work more, plan more, study more on some business plan. Remember old adage “There is no free lunch”