The first time I experienced fraud was when I was little when a man said he wanted to buy an item and my mom was not in the store at the moment. I told him the price and he gave me the highest denomination of our currency which is a thousand naira.
He purchased an item worth one hundred naira only and I was to balance him nine hundred naira which I did. My mom came back shortly after he left and I handed my mom the money happily because I made sales, my happiness faded away when my mom said it was fake currency after she had attempted to examine the note.
Back then, I was so furious that if I eventually saw that man passing by all hell would break loose. My mom noticed that I was really sad and cheered me up. She didn’t even scold or yell at me! As a child, I had that experience, and that trauma hasn’t left me that was one rationale behind not trusting people. He took advantage of my childish essence and I never forgave him till date. Do I even have an idea of what forgiveness is then?
Fast forward to these modern days, the rate of fraudulent activities has escalated that if one isn’t vigilant and cautious enough they would be a victim of it unknowingly. Well, one has to learn one way or the other to have such an experience. I have always been an overthinker, I process thoughts both positive and negative in seconds and this is a result of past encounters.
Any form that this fraudulent act might take is still a scam because the fraudster is scheming ways to extort your hard-earned money. There are means they used to feast on their prey and they do not come directly at you then coerce you to do so. These set of scammers are cooking up strategies every day to lure people into their trap because once their old scheme is well-known or obsolete they improvise quickly.
HOW THEY CAN GET THEIR VICTIMS
- Through Fear.
- Through Emotional blackmail.
- Through your details such as bank, profile, and other means of identification.
- Through Ponzi schemes and so forth.
For a grown-ass man to do that to a child who is just looking after her mother’s store what do you think he can do more? I was empirically praying for a miracle to happen so I could collect my mother’s hard-earned money.
Ever since then the trauma it left me made me extremely cautious before you said jack, I knew what next would happen and the disadvantage was that I couldn’t try to invest so much in business, especially an online one.
I am a victim of a Ponzi scheme such as MMM and to date, these scammers aren’t resting at all. They keep looking for another means to create another Ponzi scheme by redesigning the platform user interface and persuading people to invest.
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY ORDEAL WITH A PLATFORM BEARING THE SAME NAME WITH HIVE.
My friend received an invite from his cousin to join this platform named Hive. I was dumbfounded at first that these scammers weren’t even scared that they might be trolled or something; they had the hive logo on their site.
I think I remembered going through their fake site and their disclaimer was to let people know that this is the real platform and they should disregard whatever folks would say in respect of that.
My friend was so certain that this was the real deal and the positive responses from his colleagues
it was an assurance so he registered and joined the investors there, according to him the amount of money that one invested would be mined at 10 percent as income for 54 days.
In due time, I started seeing my buddies posting “ Hive is the real deal ”, at first I was happy they knew about Hive but when I looked closely it was a fake site and these scammers were using a mining machine as the products that should be invested to with different price range attached to it.
This is how it works, when you purchase a particular product worth about a certain amount of money, each day you get ten percent of it as mining until the specified period. In that period, when you mine out the amount of money that was invested then the remaining days are your profit.
Before he could get out his invested capital, the platform went null and he lamented bitterly.
And soonest after the closure of that platform, those scammers invented another one that looked similar and I sent him the link to confirm. Before that, My cousin's brother had been sending me these links to join because there is a referral bonus attached to it, I went through it and discovered it was the same as the other one with a redesigned interface.
I tried to tell my cousin that this was a scam but he didn’t listen, little did I know that he had convinced my uncle ha-ha. My uncle registered and persuaded me thoroughly until I gave in but more reason I did that was to allow him access to his referral bonus and then I started collecting my daily income and withdrawing them weekly before it shuts down because even my uncle didn’t believe either.
And at the third week after my registration, the platform was annulled. My friend had already confirmed it to be the same people and I didn’t even collect my complete capital talk more of the income.
This is a typical example of a Ponzi scheme for fraudsters and their fraudulent activities have been recognized, soon they will use another pattern and people will still fall for it.
This is a response to the #hivelearners word of the week episode two - #hl-exclusive & #hl-w85e2.
Link to Canva for Editing.
Image from Pixabay
Image from Pixabay
