Have you ever scammed a scammer?

Yes I did and made enough money to buy several weeks shopping. I was so angry that two guys had tried to rip me off that I turned the tables on them and walked off with 1,500 of their genuine Euros.

This is what happened………..

My wife runs a small licensed real estate business in Northern Poland mainly dealing with non Polish nationals who want to buy property here and I help out.

I took a call in the office from a guy who said he was from the former Belgian Congo and he and his Brother had decided to invest in Polish property and could we meet with them to discuss what they could buy.

We arranged to meet in their hotel in the nearest big town, 100 km away, it was an up market 4 star establishment so I had high hopes that we might be doing some business.

Met the guy in reception, gold Rolex, Italian suit etc, and he asked us to go up to their suite to discuss business with him and his Brother.

Scam radar on full alert.

We had some coffee and general discussion about property, the ‘Brother’ only spoke French and as I am fairly fluent I could understand what they were saying to each other and started to sense that something was not going right and we were going to be robbed or something was going down. The original contact spoke good English but as my wife only speaks Polish she was totally unaware what was going on.

Now things started to get a bit strange as one of them put an attache case on the coffee table opened it to reveal stacks of black paper shaped like banknotes and

a few real looking Euro notes (not dollars as in the pic) .

Apparently their Father was the former Belgian Congo Finance Minister and had skimmed off millions of Euros of infrastructure grants. The money had been sent from the EU covered in a black dye for ‘security reasons’.

Now you could remove the dye and then you had lots of nice crisp new Euro notes….err could we help them clean up this case of notes ?All of them 500 Euros (which were in circulation at the time) .

The ‘Brother’ then produced a plastic tray put one of the black notes in it put some liquid on it ran it through a set of hand held rollers and out popped a nice new 500 Euro note.

OOh! I acted really impressed so asked him to do it again and again. Now three slightly damp 500 Euro notes which the ‘Brother’ dried off with the hairdryer in the bathroom were on the table..

I held them up to the light and they did look really genuine, so asked what the deal was. Apparently I could have the entire contents of the case plus the liquid to clean the notes and the roller gizmo for 100,000 Euros, making around 2 million Euros profit which I would split 50:50 with them as they could not do the job themselves as they needed someone in Poland to work with who had premises where the cleaning of the money could be done discreetly.

I of course agreed most enthusiastically with one proviso I needed to take the three notes to a Bureau De Change near to the hotel to check the three 500 Euro notes were genuine. Now this was a bit of a risk as I thought one of the guys might accompany us but as both were huge black guys who were very noticeable, as in Poland we have so few black people here, I was banking on the fact they might wait back at the hotel. I promised to just be a few minutes, so took my wife with me and as soon as we hit the street we ran round the corner and got in our car and zoomed off.

Now she was really puzzled as to what was going on but I told her to wait a bit. We crossed to the other side of town where there was another Bureau De Change or Kantor as they are known here. I went in with the three notes and explained to the cashier that I was really worried that these notes were forgeries and could he check them very carefully for me.

He spent about five minutes scanning them under UV light, examining them with a magnifying glass and a few other tests before telling me they were genuine, so I changed them into Polish zloty.

PAYDIRT!

6,000 zloty

Stopped off on the way back home, bought some nice wine, fillet steaks and at dinner later, toasted our generous friends from Africa.

OK so probably you are thinking was I not worried that these guys might come looking for me? Probably not, but you never know.

So just to cover that one, sent a text message to the one guys phone, ‘ Sorry I did not get back to you but we got arrested at the Bureau De Change as there was something wrong with that money, I tried not to tell the Police where the money came from but in the end I had to, I told them another hotel to where you are staying though so you have some time, suggest you get out of Poland as quickly as you can’ .

Strange, I never heard from them again.

Image source: shutterstock.com