A COUNTY Limerick woman has told how she got scammed out of almost €10,000 in savings as the perpetrators used a number of ploys to bleed her dry.
She details the sneaky, underhanded and devious methods they used to steal her hard-earned savings. The woman doesn’t wish to be named but does want to warn others not to fall into the traps she fell into.
“I first saw an ad for online loans on Facebook in January 2020. I decided to apply for a car loan of €7,000. I got approval and then got back a message through email that if I gave them some money I’d get more of a loan. So I gave them €300,” she said.
The requests for more money kept coming. After a few months she had handed over €3,000 and “no sign of my loan on the way”.
“I had asked about it several times but got no reply from them,” she said. If that wasn’t bad enough, matters took another duplicitous turn.
“I got a message on WhatsApp from a man claiming to be a solicitor. He said they found the man that took the money off me for the supposed loan. The ‘solicitor’ said if I paid him a fee of €300 he could get me my money back so I paid it.”
Then there was another twist in the tale.
“A bank official sent me a message looking for money from me so he could send me over the money I had lost. It cost €400. I asked him why it was so expensive to transfer the money from his account to my account.
“He said the bank in his country do it that way….
