As a naive first-time car buyer trawling social media for a good deal, an advert for a VW GTI caught my eye. I quickly took the details and contacted the seller. She promised that all was above board and that all I needed to do was deposit R 15 000 into an account and wait at a local shopping mall where she would dispatch a driver to collect me. Once this was done, the pair of us would drive to their premises and I would just need to submit the remainder of the payment and complete the paperwork.
I enquired what the reason for the deposit was and she assured me that it was to secure the vehicle because so many other interested buyers had already contacted her. The unease gnawing at the pit of my stomach was something I had ignored before, with disastrous consequences. Acting against it had often put me at the losing end of some deal or other, so I asked her to send me the business address.
Thanks to Google maps, an online search of the business revealed that it stood on an empty plot. I breathed a sigh of relief, but realised that if my sixth sense had not kicked in, I would have been R15 000 poorer sans car.
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What followed was agitated phone calls between myself and the purported dealer. I humoured her for a while and once she realised the deposit would not be made, she became very aggressive. From the cool, almost coaxing voice to an invective-filled conversation which was a sign that I had made the right decision.
This fool and his money would not be parted on that day. The experience left me wondering how many hardworking South Africans fall prey to similar scams each day?
The numbers are staggering and the modus operandi surprisingly similar. The telltale signs were there, but in my haste to get new wheels, I had almost committed a fatal blunder.
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Here is my checklist of warning signs:
-The offer is way too good to be true
-Scammers identify your need and make promises which they will never be able to keep
-They inevitably demand seemingly innocuous sums of upfront cash and invariably use contact information (cellphone) and change this before you are able to lodge a case
-Use online tools such as Google to check the veracity of their claims
