Have you ever been conned ? Part 2.
I am not writing this blog to expose the group of people who conned me, but just to record their ingenuity and acting abilities.
I guess this too happened within a few months of the first one. We were living in Domlur and late evening I had driven to the nearby market to buy veggies. This was before the traffic-mess days, so one was allowed to actually park there. It was dusk, actually more than dusk, just the last bit of light before night. I saw a slot that I could park into, but a man was sitting there. He was sitting on his haunches and looked like a villager. As I backed into the space, he got up and I parked.
He had meanwhile joined a group of people, which had at least two women (in 30’s) two kids and one man. They had a number of bags with them, as if they were traveling. Just as I got out of the car, one of the men approached me and asked me if I knew Hindi. He explained that they were from some place in Maharashtra (their clothes confirmed this) and were labourers at some construction site. Their contractor had defaulted on wages and they wanted some money to buy tickets to go home as there was some festival (Diwali ?) approaching. They just wanted 200 rupees. It was a convincing story. Unfortunately I had only 50 with me. So I actually went to a kirana/ grocery shop that I regularly bought from and borrowed 100 bucks and gave it them. Then I went back home and told my wife what had happened. We thought that I should go back and give them some more money. So I went back. But they were nowhere to be seen. I drove around but there was no sign of them. They had vanished. It surprised me because it looked like they would definitely have needed more than a 100 bucks to buy tickets and I had expected them to be still around asking other people for help. Anyway, they were not to be found and I came home.
Some time later, maybe more than an year, a similar group again approached me. They may even have been the same people. The size and composition of the group, their approach (do you know Hindi ? the contractor has not paid, etc), the timing (dusk) and their clothes immediately flashed the earlier experience to me, and I knew I had been conned then! Of course I wasn’t going to be fooled twice.
Since then I have been approached twice again (once in Ahmedabad!) by similar groups and in a complete action replay, and have on several occasions seen someone else being approached. It’s a neat trick and seems to work wonderfully well.
I sometimes wonder if some enterprising person has an IPR on this and is franchising the whole con.
I am not writing this blog to expose the group of people who conned me, but just to record their ingenuity and acting abilities.
I guess this too happened within a few months of the first one. We were living in Domlur and late evening I had driven to the nearby market to buy veggies. This was before the traffic-mess days, so one was allowed to actually park there. It was dusk, actually more than dusk, just the last bit of light before night. I saw a slot that I could park into, but a man was sitting there. He was sitting on his haunches and looked like a villager. As I backed into the space, he got up and I parked.
He had meanwhile joined a group of people, which had at least two women (in 30’s) two kids and one man. They had a number of bags with them, as if they were traveling. Just as I got out of the car, one of the men approached me and asked me if I knew Hindi. He explained that they were from some place in Maharashtra (their clothes confirmed this) and were labourers at some construction site. Their contractor had defaulted on wages and they wanted some money to buy tickets to go home as there was some festival (Diwali ?) approaching. They just wanted 200 rupees. It was a convincing story. Unfortunately I had only 50 with me. So I actually went to a kirana/ grocery shop that I regularly bought from and borrowed 100 bucks and gave it them. Then I went back home and told my wife what had happened. We thought that I should go back and give them some more money. So I went back. But they were nowhere to be seen. I drove around but there was no sign of them. They had vanished. It surprised me because it looked like they would definitely have needed more than a 100 bucks to buy tickets and I had expected them to be still around asking other people for help. Anyway, they were not to be found and I came home.
Some time later, maybe more than an year, a similar group again approached me. They may even have been the same people. The size and composition of the group, their approach (do you know Hindi ? the contractor has not paid, etc), the timing (dusk) and their clothes immediately flashed the earlier experience to me, and I knew I had been conned then! Of course I wasn’t going to be fooled twice.
Since then I have been approached twice again (once in Ahmedabad!) by similar groups and in a complete action replay, and have on several occasions seen someone else being approached. It’s a neat trick and seems to work wonderfully well.
I sometimes wonder if some enterprising person has an IPR on this and is franchising the whole con.
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