Beware of scammers

WHEN economic conditions are harsh and unfavourable citizens employed in both the private and public sectors should be careful with their hard-earned savings and unnecessary loans to invest in fast money scams and schemes.
These kind of fraudulent and deceiving tactics are new to Papua New Guinea and an average literate citizen can easily fall prey to attractive advertisements and carefully selected commercial jargon used to lure the unsuspecting vulnerable average worker.
These vulnerable group may comprise of teachers, nurses, construction workers, mining employees, SME owners, housewives, or even local and national leaders themselves, corporate managers, heads of state agencies, etc.
Be careful with various scenarios of unsuspecting messages with pictures of the senders’address posted online on Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter or Instagram or other forms of social media, television, radio, or print media.
Don’t just quickly get emotionally excited and react to instantly.
These are likely cases of scammers or con artists trying their luck on any person who can easily be hooked up to their trap!
You will be caught in their trap, so to speak, when you respond on first instance.
If you do, they (cybercriminals/con artists) will take you through a series of questions and requirements in which case you could be required to give a response or answer the questions.
By doing so, you don’t realise that you could give away your confidential personal information such as email address, phone numbers, bank account details, identification cards (driving licences, NID), which they can use against you to hack (electronically transfer by default) your money in your account or tell you to do it yourself for a promised lucrative interest return in a shortest time possible.
These could be hackers or cybercriminals from those technologically advanced countries around the world, preying on vulnerable or weak people.
They could post unexpected messages on social media platforms with pictures of someone nicely dressed with city skyscrapers as the background or sitting in a luxury vehicle or looking frail and old but sitting at a well-groomed backyard or in a hospital a bed.
When you see these types of messages and pictures,don’t just respond on your smartphone or ask someone to do it for you.
Instead ask any person you know is better educated and knowledgeable for their advice or simply ignore the message.
You must reason out that nothing in this world is free and everything comes from human effort and time invested.
On the same note, the Immigration and Citizen Authority should do proper due diligence and proper-persons test (set up a standard questionaire to be filled), for any foreign national who may want to visit Papua New Guinea for whatever reason on short term or long term visas or even citizenship/dual citizenship, work permits, etc.
These stringent measures can protect the security and integrity of our systems and processes so that Papua New Guinea cannot be labelled as a vulnerable country for easy exploitation of our people and resources by wrong persons for wrong reasons.
A recent case in point was a news article headlined, court tells foreigner, company to pay K12 million back to locals.
In this case, more than 2,500 Papua New Guineans lost in total about K12 million to a scammer and con man from South Africa who pretend to be a genuine investor or international businessman and slipped through our authorities undetected.
He ripped off 2,500 locals of their hard-earned Kina.
How this South African con man can be brought back to the country to face the penalty and payback the money to locals remains to be facilitated at the expense of state resources and effort.

Philip Ukuni