The Frauds Among Us

We’ve been thinking of selling the house and moving to somewhere closer to the workplace and the children’s school. Therefore, last week we tried our luck by putting a column advertisement on the most well known daily paper in West Java, with the hope that we can attract some prospective buyers of the house.

The ad was placed on the Saturday edition of the paper. We crossed our fingers and since early that day we’d been eagerly waiting for a call responding to it. The first response that we received in the morning was a text message, saying: 

Hallo, I am Ms. Fitri, I read your ad on the paper, and your house suits my preference. Would you please contact my husband to do negotiation about the price? His name is Mr. Hendarto and he can be contacted at this number 08XXXXXX. 

Okay, that message sounds fishy. How can people be interested in a house that they haven’t seen, let alone visited? And why should we make a call instead of them calling us? I’ve heard some news about phone scam, where the scammers, through a phone conversation lead the victims to transfer some money through ATM. I guessed this person was one of them. So we ignored that message.

It was not very long after the first message when we received the second text message from different sender number, saying:

Hallo, I am Ms. Emy, I read your ad on the paper, and your house suits my preference. Would you please contact my husband to do negotiation about the price? His name is Mr. Hartanto and he can be contacted at this number 08XXXXXX. 

Oh, my... If they are planning a scam, at least they should be more creative about it. Why do they think they can fool people by using different number and changing the names, but not altering the sentence even a little bit? They must be the stupidest scammers around. So, again, we ignored that message.

And we didn’t have to wait for long before that idiot sending another message:

Hallo, I am Mrs.Sri Mulyani, I read your ad on the paper, and your house suits my preference. Would you please contact my husband to do negotiation about the price? His name is Mr. Tony and he can be contacted at this number 08XXXXXX. 

At this point we couldn’t help but laughed our a*s off. Sri Mulyani? The former finance minister of Indonesia who is currently the Director of IMF? Oh, Mrs. Sri Mulyani, it’s an honour if you’re interested in buying our humble house. Thanks but no, thanks, we’re not that desperate.

Getting tired of receiving this rubbish, my husband answered to that text message :

Thank you Mrs. Sri Mulyani. If you’re interested in buying the house, please contact Komisaris Polisi XXXX for he is the owner of the house. I am only the intermediary.

Komisaris Polisi, or Police Commissioner is the mid rank officer of Indonesian National Police. And the answer message apparently worked. She/he/they stopped texting us. Good to know that police institution can finally come in handy  :) 

So that day we basically just laughed, cringed,  laughed again. There goes our 60 thousand rupiahs for putting the ad for nothing. The rest of the messages that we received that day is just a load of some other rubbish. Like this one:

I am a paranormal expert. If you want to have luck in selling the house, you can get my insight by contacting me at 08XXXXXX. The fee is only 100 thousand rupiahs.

Or the most recent one:

I am Preacher AsXX from Majalengka. I can help selling your house with the fee being only 200 thousand rupiahs. Guaranteed that your house can be sold within 3 hours.

Sold within three hours? Was he talking about selling a house? Or Justin Bieber concert tickets?

My, oh my…. what a fraudulent society we live in. Wasn’t there any sane person reading our ad at all? We had experience putting an ad some years ago when we sold the previous house, but we didn’t receive fraudulent messages back then as many as we do now. Their population is growing very fast apparently. Probably due to the conducive atmosphere created by the fraudulent political elites in this country. But I digress.

Maybe putting an ad on the paper is not a good idea to begin with, as that can expose us to the crooks that need full alertness to deal with. We’d better come to the professional property agent and let them suffer do the job. :)