Return Of Tricksters In Port Harcourt

Residents of Port Harcourt and its environs should not lose touch with their vigilance over the deceptive ploys of trickters with promising business intentions that mostly ended in tears and tethers. It would be recalled that years ago, the activities of people, who clamed to have business concern, with obvious unfamiliarities with the city revved around with a handful of people falling to their booby traps. The scenarios became ubiquitous and lost track and the city heaved a sigh of relief for a relative period .
Today, there is evidently a resurgence of the psycho-fraud with the constars, getting more rooted in the deal. Now they come up with more subtle devices to secure the sympathy of their targets for instance, the trick has moved from the regular use of francophone patoise to create a sense of conventions convocation, to a play of deception over unexisting business transactions, there is a new way of attracting people to the manipulations of trickters.
One is the placement of vacancies for unexisting jobs to which people are asked to submit applications for jobs ranging, from teaching, housekeeping, shop keeping, baby nursing, clerical, production staff, among others. The vacancies are mostly placed vaguely at strategic points targeted at hood winking some gullible passers-by, who often meet their water loo, in the process.
The Tide investigation reveal that, mostly young school leavers, who move into the city for greener pastures are the targets of these tricksters.
A typical experience was the one that happened at Elelenwo in Port Harcourt recently, where a young man was trapped by some fraudsters in his desperate search for a job. The young man name with held, submitted an application for an online job, and got himself ensnared to almost journey of no return at the Azuabie axis of Port Harcourt, except for divine intervention. Narrating his ordeal to The Tide, the victim, said, after the online submission for the supposed vacancy, he was tricked into a fraudulent deal to bring 50k before he would be offered employment in a company known as, “Alpha Monument Enterprise, supposedly into the production of ceramic tiles and furniture. He said, he got to Trans Amadi and asked about the designated location and identity of the company but it was non-existent. “After I discovered that the location they gave me was fake, they refused to pick the calls again, and it dawned on me that I was ditched. The luck I had was that I had not paid the 50k they told me to pay, to get the job”.
Another category of tricksters in the city are, fake agents who display sign posts of non-existing landed property and residential accommodations for renting. The tricksters are always swift to demand mobilisation fees, from their victims with the claim to give them good residential apartments or connect them to good landed property for sale.
A victim, who narrated his ordeal to The Tide, recently said, he needed a two-bedroom apartment, and followed up a public notice to that effect, but discovered that the notice was fraudulent and over three persons had been defrauded for same apartment located at Elekahia in Port Harcourt.
He said the landlord, who is virtually at large now, was said to have defrauded several people by collecting money from them for the same apartment. Another sordid tale was an encounter at Rumuomoi in Obio /Akpor LGA recently where a woman used her child as a collateral to buy food stuff for her other hungry kids in the guise of going to bring money for the payment of the purchased food items. The bubble burst when hours after the woman refused to turn up for the deal and abandoned her two-year old daughter at the point of purchase. It took the intervention of the community members to save the situation, as few concerned people paid for the foodstuff to secure the release of the girl.
A cross section of residents of the city who spoke with The Tide said, with the exigencies of time, several deceptive measures are being devised to survive the tough times, as hunger happens to be the closest companion of the people.

Taneh Beemene