{Rwanda National Police (RNP) has called upon the general public to be aware of fraudsters, who employed varied unscrupulous means defraud unsuspecting people.}
According to Police, among the major scams that have been recorded in the recent past involves defrauding unsuspecting individuals, sometimes indirectly or even directly.
“We urge the public to always be conscious about people who may want to offer them services or sell them something at a very cheap price. There are higher chances that such persons are attempting to con you,” Supt. Jean Claude Karasira, the director of Anti-corruption and public fund embezzlement directorate, said during a live talk-show on a local radio station.
Supt. Karasira was reacting to some incidents that have led to the arrest of some fraudsters.
There are common scams that occur in different places around the country but mostly in city centers. They include overcharging, deceiving or coercing a person into paying for a service they don’t want, and outright theft.
A case in point is when people enter a commuter taxi and start duping passengers into giving them their belonging pretending to be helping them to keep their belongings safe from thieves.
“You should not succumb to such lies, there is no way a fellow passenger who is a complete stranger to you can convince you that they have the ability to keep your money safer than you can do,” Supt. Karasira warned.
One of the cases that police have handled involved a ring of five people, who were arrested defrauding traders in the City of Kigali. They had already duped seven traders in Kigali of about Rwf50 million, at the time of their arrest.
The conmen would pose as employees of Strabag, a road construction firm, looking for spare parts for their machines.
After identifying a potential target, one of them would call the traders to sell them the fake idea of supplying strabag with the equipment.
The victims would then be given contacts of another person claiming to be the technical director of strabag, who claims to be based in Gicumbi.
The fake technical director would then inform the victims, separately, of how they need the equipment as soon as possible, offer them a very high price if he delivered the equipment and would direct him to another person – member of the gang – claiming he’s the only person with those spare parts.
The victim would then buy the apparatuses at a very high price and the suspects would varnish after accomplishing their scam.
The gang had used photocopies of other people’s national ID to buy SIM-cards, which they used to coordinate their criminal acts.
Other scams include fraudster who target the rich claiming that they are auctioning some minerals at a give-away price and hoodwink them into believing the seller is in urgent need of money and that’s why they are selling them cheaply
There also those who impersonate telecom staff calling people and deceiving them that they won a jackpot and ask them to dial some digits on their phone in the end they steal all the money a victim had on their mobile banking account.
Black dollars
Conmen have different tricks and according to Supt. Karasira, there are those that approach people carrying a box full of black-painted piece of papers claiming that they need money to buy a particular chemical that would be used to turn the paper into US dollars.
Conmen usually dupe their victim into believing that they would share the amount if he or they gave them the money to buy the chemical.
“In actually sense, the scammers are just looking at putting their hand on the money and disappear.”
Other fraudsters target students and job-seekers and promise them jobs in some place far from their homes; the victim is later asked to wire money for the hotel on their first night. By the time the victim riches the place, the caller has switch off the phone and disappeared with the money, or steal their computer laptops after making the victim to believe that he has gone to install a certain programme that is required to do the job.
One of the most awkward cons involves fraudsters who claim that gorilla semen are selling way expensively; they pack some liquid in a bottle and sell it at US$700 and convinces the buyer that they will sell “a bottle full of gorilla semen at US$10,000.
Others pretend to be having hundreds of kilogrammes of gold worth hundreds of millions of francs, and they attempt to convince the unsuspecting victim that they have run out of money to transport it so they decide to sell it cheaply in most cases at US10, 000, but claim that the goods are already in another country.
This way, they continue to solicit more money from the victim like money for air tickets and some money to bribe officials.
“There are several other tricks they use but we manage to always be a step ahead of them. We urge the public to be on alert at all times, deal in legal businesses and be quick to inform police in case they encounter such.” He said
He said that most of these people have been arrested, either in Rwanda or in other countries, with the support of police institutions in countries where they are hiding interpol office inthose countries.
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