|
|
South Africa: Well-Dressed Scam Artist Targets Older Women
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Cape Argus (Cape Town)
17 July 2008
Posted to the web 17 July 2008
Kate Douglas
Older women appear to be becoming a popular target for money scams in and around Cape Town.
One 84-year-old woman told the Cape Argus how she was approached by a man in Cavendish Square, who claimed to have known her late husband well.
"He was about 5 feet 11 (180 metres), lightly coloured and about 45 years old. He told me that my husband had been good to him and that he wanted to do the same for me," she said.
The man told her he wanted to present her with some fruit he was selling, and asked her to follow him to his car. She followed, but said that "the moment I entered the parking lot I knew I had made a mistake".
The man then followed her to her car and asked for some change. When she opened her wallet and he saw her cash, he demanded she hand it all over.
"I wasn't going to argue with him because there were no security guards in the parking lot," she said.
The man took about R250 and disappeared. The widow said he was nicely dressed and well-spoken.
Another widow, 76, says she was approached by a man fitting the same description in the Blue Route Mall.
He also told her he had been close to her husband and insisted that he give her some free fish.
"He is obviously going for older women because there are certainly more widows than widowers," she said.
This time the man asked her for change for R50. He told her he would fetch both the fish and the R50 from his car. When she told him that she would go with him to his car, he walked alongside her for a bit and then suddenly disappeared into the crowd.
"I don't part easily with my money so I wasn't willing to just give it to him," the woman said.
Meanwhile, a second scam is also doing the rounds in the city.
Con artists call domestic workers claiming to work for the Unemployment Insurance Fund.
They gather information about their working hours and their employers then later call the employer, saying their domestic worker has died - and ask for money to transfer the body or pay for the funeral.
Gill Cullinan, who nearly fell for the scam recently, said she was lucky because she had heard about it.
|
"The way to combat this scam is to tell people about it and encourage them not to give any personal information to strangers, regardless of who they claim to be," Cullinan said.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2008 Cape Argus. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
