Why people get conned

One morning, I met two young men as I was walking home after a prayer night. The men asked for directions to a radio station and I told them to continue walking straight and they would get their intended destination. As I made to continue with my journey, the young men dropped their voice into a conspiratorial tone and showed me a test tube with some shinny substance which they pronounced to be diamonds.
The pair continued with their tale, saying the diamond had been recovered from a motor accident that occurred the previous day. The generous young men wanted to pass over the whole loot to me in exchange for a relatively small amount of money to take care of their travel expenses. By that time, we were near the Central Police Station and I advised the young men to take their find to the police instead of attempting to make money out of something that had been recovered from an accident victim. The mention of police sent the young men scampering as fast as their legs could carry them.
While I escaped being conned by the young men, surprisingly there are many people who still fall prey to this kind of trick.

Greed
Greed is the leading reason why people are conned. The story is told that the folks in South America trap monkeys by putting groundnuts in a glass jar with a narrow neck. When the monkey reaches for the groundnut, greed will make it grab many seeds and it will fail to pull its paw out of the jar. Life offers many glass jars that trap the greedy.
A former legislator lost a lot of money in an internet scam. The man got an email that is routinely sent to people with the claim that the writer has access to a vast sum of money that he wants to transfer to the bank account of his new found friend.
While most people ignore such kind of email, the legislator followed it up and soon, there was a back and forth correspondence between him and the scammer. To cut a long story short, the conversation stopped when the legislator forwarded £4,000 (Shs18.8 million) to the online benefactor who promptly vanished without a trace.
Greed is the main driver of Ponzi schemes and Uganda is home to many of such schemes. A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investing scam that promises high rates of return with little risk to investors. In the Ponzi scheme, the money got from new investors is used to pay returns to older investors and when the scheme collapses, the people who put money into it are left crying.

Fear
Fear is another reason why people get conned out of money. In this case, the con person uses blackmail to extract money from the victim. Fear has many pressure points including the fear of the law and that was the case with Grant (not real name). Grant had a payroll problem; he had not been remitting income tax and social security contributions of his employees to the relevant authorities.
When Grant decided to fire a non-performing employee, the man threatened to report the company to the tax authorities as well as the National Social Security Fund. This time the unproductive employee wanted to be paid without even pretending to work like he used to do before. The blackmail was only stopped when Grant opted to report himself to the two authorities. Apart from fear of the law, other people are affected by the fear of loss of face or call it shame.

Ignorance
Ignorance is the other reason why people get cheated. Many years back, I lost money on a farming enterprise because I was ignorant of something very basic: the dimensions of an acre. The people on the ground told me that they had hired a tractor to plough 10 acres. After the ploughing was completed, I went and walked around the garden which felt like 10 acres to me, never mind that I did not measure it. I therefore paid for 10 acres for ploughing, bought seeds for 10 acres, paid planters for 10 acres, paid weeding for 10 acres, build a crib to hold produce from 10 acres and paid harvesters for 10 acres. The next season I decided to increase my acreage by another five acres. This time, I got a stave and measured the garden and discovered that my original 10 acres was more like five acres!
Ignorance is a very costly thing and you are bound to lose money if you are ignorant about a business or investment. The world has many cheats and whoever wants to do business or investment should be ready to learn a lot about the venture.
The story is told of an army officer who did not want to be cheated by builders when constructing his house. The man would go to the building site very early in the morning and supervise the mixing of the mortar then leave the builders to carry on with the work.
After about a week, the officer was approached by a whistle-blower who advised him to stealthily return to the site after supervising the morning mortar mix.
The next morning, the officer pretended to go away after supervising the mixing of sand and cement but stealthily came back as advised by the whistle-blower. What he saw shocked him to the core.
The builders had created a bridge to a neighbouring plot and were busy ferrying the concrete mix to it. On the plot stood a structure which was at the same level as that of the officer. The builder was using materials provided by the officer to build two houses.
To succeed financially, you need to overcome these three enemies: greed, fear and ignorance.

Avoid it
Be skeptical. Question everything: phone calls, mail solicitations, email offers, links on social media. Don’t take things at face value.
Don’t trust your caller ID. Never do business over the phone unless you initiate the call. Here’s why: No matter what your caller ID might say, you don’t really know who’s on the other end of the line. If you place the call yourself, divulging personal information isn’t as risky. If you receive a call from someone who claims to be with your bank, insurance company or some other place where you do business -- unless you recognise the caller -- say you’ll call back. That will give you time to make sure the number is legitimate.

James Abola is the team leader of Akamai Global, a business and finance consulting firm. Email: [email protected].