‘He sounded frail – but took us for a ride’

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A RICHARDS Bay woman is raging mad after her kind-hearted husband was duped out of their hard-earned money by a man who sounded ‘like a desperate crime victim’ on the phone.

She and her husband own a steel fabrication company in Alton.

On Tuesday morning of last week they took a phone call in their workshop office from a ‘frail-sounding, Afrikaans man, speaking good English’.

‘He sounded terribly upset and said he lived on a small farm on the outskirts of Empangeni.

‘He explained that his fence had been cut the previous night and he and his wife had been the victim of an armed robbery – and that they had lost everything.

‘We were convinced quite easily, as he sounded genuinely upset.

‘He asked if we could please help him with emergency steel to repair his damaged fence as ‘he and his wife were extremely vulnerable,’ she explains.

The couple suspected nothing, and the man immediately agreed to make a special trip to the farm to assist the traumatised couple with urgency.

‘But as my husband was about to leave for the farm, the man called back, saying that he was running out of airtime and was desperate to make contact with his children – who were terribly concerned and lived out of town.

‘You always think you’ll never fall for it. But we did.

‘We ended up buying R900 worth of airtime, which we sent to him, and he promised he would pay us back as soon as the police had found – or he had replaced – his stolen bank cards.’

Of course the smallholding in question was never found, leaving the kind-hearted businessman driving around for hours before he finally accepted that he had been ‘taken for a ride’.

‘I know we shouldn’t have, but we fell for it.

‘I want to warn all business owners to be aware of what happened to us, in the hopes that it will not happen to them.’