Conmen are apparently going door to door trying to scam durian lovers with rigged weighing scales

Mao Shan Wang durians — loved by connoisseurs for its bittersweet flavour and creamy flesh — are a tad bit pricier than its lesser cousins, and conmen are taking advantage of both its value and our affection for the king of fruits to pull off scams.

A netizen went on a rant on Facebook warning others about “some bastards” who he claimed to have tried swindling his wife when he wasn’t around at home.

How it works:

© Eugene Lau MSW

• Vendors go door to door to sell “Mao Shan Wang quality” durians at $15 per fruit
• Once buyer agrees to buy some, vendors will start opening up durians — without asking the buyer.
• Once opened, vendors will say that it’s $15 per kilogram. Protests by buyer will be deflected with vendors saying that they must have “misheard”.
• They’ll then whip out their weighing scale. Presumably rigged, they’ll weigh out the durians. Weight shown will be supremely excessive, and vendors will demand buyers to pay up, and refuse to leave until they’re paid.

Luckily for the netizen’s wife, she went to call her husband, who subsequently called the police. The durian scammers quickly left, stating that they’ll return to get their payment. They never did.

The police did come by — one of whom informed the netizen that even his own mother fell prey to the durian scam.

“Kudos to these fellas for making the effort to rig their weighing scale and coming up with such a creative scam,” he wrote. “Dear family and friends, please take note of this and warn your close ones to stay vigilant and not fall prey to these durian scammers.”

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Eugene Lau

on Thursday

Some bastards came to our place today and tried to sell some durians to my wife for $15 per durian, claiming that it was MSW quality. My wife agreed to buy some from them and they started opening up the durians but before she knew it they told her that they had opened up 6 durians (surely these durians in the tupperware look like they came from 6 bloody durians) and wanted to charge her $15 per KG instead of per durian and insisted that she had misheard them. Next, they took ...

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