By Muyid Deen Suleman
Asawase (Ash) Sept. 18 – GNA – Sultan Umar Farouk Saeed, the Zongo Chief in the Ashanti Region, has advised residents in Zongo communities to be vigilant when dealing with people offering rewards, which are too good to be true.
He said such characters were often fraudsters whose method was to offer juicy packages to the unsuspecting public only to defraud their victims when they least expect it.
Thousands of people in Asawase and its environs were recently defrauded by some people claiming that the government was going to disburse funds to citizens adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
They took GHC20.00 from their victims as registration for the disbursement of the funds but it turned out to be a fraudulent scheme without authorisation from any government agency.
Some of the victims are still struggling to get back their Ghana cards and other forms of identification taken from them under the pretext of facilitating their applications.
The Zongo Chief, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, said it was disheartening for such miscreants to deliberately swindle people, especially in this economic downturn.
He said beyond such fraudulent schemes people should do proper checks to verify the authenticity of any venture before investing their money in them.
They should learn to report suspicious schemes to the police for the necessary action to be taken to avert the possibility of many people falling victim to such unscrupulous characters.
The GNA gathered that about 1000 people, mostly women within the Asawase Constituency, were scammed by the fraudsters who have vanished from the affected communities.
GNA