It’s surprising how our world all of a sudden moved from being a safe space to the worst you can ever imagine in term of technology. About four to five years ago, we started hearing news of how people were getting scammed and we were being advised to pay very keen attention so as to not fall victim to this scheme. But the truth is ,you can never be too careful since these people know what they are doing.
Cyber crime has now grown to become an everyday thing especially in Ghana. You see young boys engaged in something called ‘yahoo’ which is basically scamming other people on the internet. And funny enough, even though everyone frowned on it for a moment, now, surprisingly, mothers are even encouraging their sons to learn how to scam people just because of money. It’s really a shame but in this economy no one cares about shame anymore. They say a man must do what he must to survive.
The police service and other institutions have tried their best to regulate this situation for years now but there’s a limit to what they can do. Day in day out about over 100 people get scammed in Ghana and it has become a normal thing. From their bank account , to mobile money accounts and even social media accounts. It was really funny when people’s whatsapp and facebook started getting hacked but that was actually one way they could get a lot of money from others and I’ve experienced this first hand with a family member.
I’m someone who values safety and privacy and so when I learnt about the whatsapp 2 step verification I immediately activated mine and my moms own since she couldn’t do it on her own. I went ahead to tell my junior sister about it and she was forming hard girl. She’s also a business person and she runs her business on her whatsapp account so there’s always a lot going on in her whatsapp. That’s actually a fine target for these scammers.
Knowing my sister, she’s one to click on any link being sent to her and that’s how come they got to her. She clicked on a link sent to her by a close friend and within a twinkle of an eye her whatsapp was hacked. Nothing was changed in there but these scammers used this opportunity to take money from her customers and close relatives. She came back to access her whatsapp only to be denied access and that’s how come we all knew what was happening. We started sending out calls to everyone in business with her and our close relatives to inform them about the situation so that no one sends any money to these people thinking it was her. Eventually, she had to get a new SIM card for the mean time while her whatsapp account was getting retrieved from these scammers. It actually to her so long she just had to eventually deactivate the account and use her new SIM card.
After all this went down she finally learnt her lessons and that was the time I could make fun of her.😂 Technology is meant to do good for us but there’s always going to be a black sheep among the lot who would want to go the other way. As educated individuals , it is therefore important that we pay very close attention to some of these happenings on social media and protect ourselves accordingly .
all images belong to me.
