*Yesterday and today a bunch of guys from on the hill here decided to get some cement and fill some of the pot holes in the road. So they go out and mix some cement by hand and fill the holes and then put tufts of tall grass around the spot so you won't drive over it (no such thing as safety cones here...). Then there's always one guy with a carboard box collecting money from whoever drives by. This morning the guy holding the box, who also appeared two sheets to the wind, tried to convince me to give far more than the norm. I tossed my already generous donation in the box and kept on driving... And after all their hard work, they barely touched the tip of the iceberg that is pot holes on this hill...
*There are lots of ways that people try to trick you out of money here. Many an interior person has been tricked by people saying to them, if you give me your money, I will go to a machine and put it in and then it will make more and you will get more money back. So many people believe and will wait for hours for their money to be returned. Other people use more insidious methods. Today a friend was viciously tricked. She received a phone call saying that her husband had been in a bad car accident and had been brought to the main hospital in Jayapura and had bleeding in his brain and before they would do anything she needed to transfer money to the hospital account. They wanted 29 million but when she said that she only had 2, they said that was fine for the time being. She did not try to call her husband because there was no power all day and her hand phone was dead. The people calling were very convincing and had her call the "doctor" and talk to the "police" and everything. When she went to the bank to transfer the money the people at the bank said, wait a minute, we've heard this story before. Why don't we call your husband and check. So they did and he was of course, fine and totally ignorant of all that his wife had been going through for the last hour... YIKES!!
About Me
- Erica Feunekes
- My husband, myself and our five children are currently living Sentani, Papua, Indonesia. Hugo is Maintenance Operations Manager for Mission Aviation Fellowship.
2 comments:
I suppose every scam is nasty but that hospital one is as dirty as they come. Ouch.
When I worked at the bank I once stopped a guy from transferring $5,000USD based on the classic Nigerian fax scam that is common in Canada. As my father always reminded me - "If it sounds too good to be true it probably is." Maybe now we need to consider the opposite possibility - "If it sounds too bad to be true maybe it isn't??"
A former coworker here in Canada got hit by that scam. He was told that his sister in the US was in an accident and they needed funds before they could do a medical procedure. He gave them his credit card number. Then they called back and said that it didn't work and could he do a money transfer, so he did that too. When he didn't hear anything he called her house where she answered and he was out double.
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