Escaping An Online Scam: My Experience

It was yesterday when I was lying on my bed after coming from my classes when my girlfriend called to come to IMO messenger which we usually use to text chat and video calls. Imo is an instant messanging app and is commonly used for its lightweight properties and clarification in video and audio quality in calls in Nepal. I noticed that I had missed calls from an account named Imo Head office. I didn't care about it much and left it whatever it was and started to chat with the love of my life.

This was at around 3:15 pm local time when I received the call again from that account. This time I received the phone and a guy greeted me and told me he was talking from the headoffice of Imo messenger Kwala lampur, Malaysia.(When I googled about HQ of imo messenger I got to know it was in California, USA) He was talking in hindi with me and told me that I have won some lottery worth 1 hundred thousand ringet that would be nearly equal to 2.5 million rupees in Nepal. I could smell scam on it but wanted to see the height he could take it to.

So I pretended as if I was amazed with the news. He asked me to send the mobile number registered with imo, a selfee and a scanned copy of my citizenship certificate. I thought he was pretty cunning and he was trying hard so that I believe it was legit. I was still pretending to believe their stuff. I sent all they wanted and sent a message in english about the lottery but I got to know they don't understand a word in english. He asked, " What did you just sent me? " in hindi. ( Illiterate scammers 😛) They didn't even wrote a message to me. All the conversation was in imo phone call.

He told me that he'd call me after 5 minutes after that and even told me that he had sent some pictures of other people who won the lottery. ( I didn't receive any though) So he called me every 3 minutes to tell me that my cheque was getting ready and I could receive the money through IME or Prabhu or SBI bank or Sunrise bank remittance. "Okay well played"; I said.

Then I got this last call that my cheque was ready to be sent. But before that I would have to send 35,000 rupees to them that would be international transaction taxation fee they told me. This was when I believed that it was a real money scam. Then I wrote an email to imo messenger support group about the scam call and also included their numbers in it.

I had heard about the online scams from others, read about them in newspapers but this was my first experience about getting a call from scammers. You may get a call from scammers as well. So I thought of sharing my story so that you can be protected from this or other types of scam calls.

When we are looking for some revolution through internet, many people are making it a way to make money through fraud deals or scam calls. It is our own responsibility to protect ourselves and our relatives or anyone we know from such activities. Let's use internet for good and at the same time lets be wise enough to not get scammed.

Thank you so much for reading my article. Its based on my real experiences. If you like it please upvote and comment.

If you have a similar experience like this or any thing about scams please share them on the comments below.

Stay safe! Stay away from online scams!

Namaste!