Fashion is not the only field to have seasonality, scams too. For the spring-summer 2023 collection, a classic is making a comeback on the roads: the Irish scam. At highway rest areas, a tourist pretends to have been robbed. This crook approaches vacationers, looking overwhelmed, and recounts his so-called misadventure. A extremely effective technique for extracting money from you.
What is this scam?
Feeling sorry for themselves is the ruse of scammers. They have just been robbed, they say. It is therefore impossible to feed their families, fill up with gas, pay tolls. Logically, they then ask you to advance them money. They promise to reimburse you immediately via a telephone transfer, or upon their return. They may sometimes leave you “valuable” jewelry as a show of good faith, show you a fake complaint or ID card. And in the end, you let yourself be convinced.
Obviously, you will never see your money again and you will have no news of these so-called robbed tourists. A too naive motorist paid the price last Tuesday on the A6 motorway. He paid the full price for a 37-year-old Irishman, for whom he also made a withdrawal of 300 euros. The promised instant transfer ultimately never arrived and the victim notified the gendarmes, who caught the scammer near Chalon-sur-Saône, reveals The Saône et Loire Journal.
⋙ CALL FOR TESTIMONIALS. Have you been the victim of a scam? tell us
The national gendarmerie had raised the alarm
Social networks are full of testimonies from victims. Like this Ile-de-France resident, who tells how he lost 1,200 euros last May in Seine-et-Marne. “In two seconds, he shows me that he made a transfer of 1,100 pounds to me […]. Of course he tells me that the money will arrive in my account very quickly but that it is not instantaneous. It puts pressure on me and I feel obliged to give him“, he specifies on Twitter.
To protect motorists, the national gendarmerie has warned many times about this Irish scam, with useful advice to boot. “If such a mishap seems to be brewing on a motorway rest area (or elsewhere), have the right and only reflex that is valid in such a case: call the police or the gendarmerie. So, if they are real victims, the police will know how to help them. Otherwise, the presence of the constabulary could also prove very useful“, she says on Facebook.
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