Saja Kilani didn’t think twice when she was stopped on the street Sunday by a young boy asking for help paying his cab fare.
The boy told Kilani the driver only took card payments and that he only had cash. If she paid the driver, the boy would pay her back, she recalls him telling her.
“My first thought is… if someone is in a desperate situation, I would want someone to help me in that situation,” said Kilani, who’s from Toronto.
Despite her willingness to help, red flags kept popping up. First, the driver asked for her card. When she handed it over, the boy tried to get her attention by bombarding her with questions. Then, when she put in her PIN and reached to take her card back, the driver snatched the machine away and returned a card that didn’t have her name on it.
That’s when she realized what happened, got her actual card back and cancelled it soon after. But not everyone is so lucky.
“I know it’s hard to admit that I’ve fallen for a scam, but I’d rather admit that and have people not go through it,” said Kilani.
“If I had seen this online before… I would have avoided it.”
That’s what led Kilani to post her experience on TikTok. In just one day, she got more than 800,000 views, 75,000 likes and over 2,000 comments on her post, which includes part of her encounter with the alleged scammer.
It even caught the attention of Meaghan Onorato, who put up a similar post that went viral in May on the same platform after getting scammed in a similar way. In her…
