GULLIBLE Sabah women lose RM10 MILLION to African scammers

KOTA KINABALU - African scammers allegedly raked in about RM10.635 million in 214 cases involving women in Sabah over the past five years, said State Commercial CID chief Supt Saiman Kasran.

He said local women incurred losses to the tune of RM2.412 million last year and the amount rose to RM3.776 million (up to August) this year.

"African scams are very difficult to trace as suspects dupe unsuspecting victims by using fake profiles and pictures of other people on the Internet.

"We managed to nab only one African suspected scam artist in 201," he told reporters here today.

Saiman said the scammers appealed to the compassionate side of career women or businesswomen through Facebook, Friendster, Tagged or Myspace by promising them cash or valuables such as jewellery or would come in person to meet them to hand over the gift.

"Once the women (aged between 20 and 70) fell under their spell, the scammers asked them to pay duties on the goods to release them from the immigration or Customs custody.

"The victims were told to bank in money into an account belonging to a person unknown to them and not that of the scammer.

"The victims finally realised that they had been cheated after waiting in vain for the elusive packages," he said.

Meanwhile, Saiman said three Indonesian men were arrested at a restaurant in Inanam near here on Friday for allegedly deceiving illegal immigrants into believing that the 6D tickets purchased from them won Toto lottery prizes worth RM100,000 or RM200,000. He said they showed the victims a paper cutting showing the winning tickets.

"The scammers then drove the victims to a Toto shop on the pretext of collecting the prize money and asked them to hand over money, jewellery and mobile phones as a deposit.

"As the victims have no travel documents, they were told to photostat an identification document to enable them to claim the prize.

"Once the victims came back to the car, the scammers had gone," he said, adding that the scammers had allegedly duped 12 people involving loses amounting to RM23,030.

Two of the suspects aged 42 and 51 also allegedly involved in fraud cases in Sandakan and Kota Kinabalu since 2009, he added. – Bernama