MY SCAM EXPERIENCE

Hi steemians, I want to share with you all about my scam experience, it was just once, remember the saying "once beaten twice shy".

It happened five years ago when I was in my 200 level at the University of Uyo, Akwaibom state, Nigeria.

I had three closest friends: Anne, Eunice and Deborah. We did everything together, starting from attending lectures, eating during our free periods in the school canteen, going back to the hostel, doing our assignments and also reading.

Amongst the three of us, Eunice stayed off-campus, so most of the times, she meets up with us in school.

One of the days we finished lectures, she told us of a man that met her where she went to buy snacks, and requested that she also buy for him, which she did, Eunice was always kind-hearted.

The next day, when she came to school, she met the man again and he was happy to see her calling her his friend. Eunice went to where he was sitting to greet him, asked him whether he was a lecturer, the man said no, that he was a doctor and he came to visit a friend who was a lecturer.

He went further to tell her about a job advertisement in Uyo teaching hospital which had a salary of forty thousand naira, that he would connect her to a woman that would help her to secure a part time job as a form of gratitude for her kindness towards him, she was so excited and thanked the man very much.

Eunice called the woman while telling us about it, she told the woman about the man who refered her, and the woman requested her to send her five thousand naira worth of airtime so she could secure the job as a lot of persons where also applying for the same job.

As at that time, Eunice didn't have up to five thousand naira, so she borrowed the money from Anne to pay, hoping to pay back after she had received her first salary of forty thousand naira.

She took the money and bought five thousand naira worth of mtn recharge card and sent the woman, the woman called her back and asked her to bring her CV to the hospital by the next week.

We saw how everything worked smoothly and then we thought of calling the woman, introducing ourselves as Eunice's friend and to also beg her to help us.

We called the woman and she agreed to help us if we would do as Eunice did, and we agreed. We bought airtime and sent to her, she gave us the same date to come with our CV.

Our hearts were filled with excitement as we had already planned how we where going to spend our salaries, easing off the burden on our parents in paying our schools fees, and also supporting our parents with our income.

The day of our interview came, unfortunately we had a class which we decided to miss for the sake of this great opportunity coming our way, we wore our best cloths and took a taxi to the hospital as it was a little bit far from school.

When we arrived the hospital, Eunice called the woman and she said we should sit downstairs and wait for her as she had other people she was attending to, we waited for over an hour and we didn't see any one approach us.

Eunice called her and her number was switched off, we decided to wait a bit, stayed till the next hour and didn't see her or receive any call from her.

At this point we started thinking otherwise, then we decided to make inquiry from the hospital about people that were asked to come for interview, the man that attended to us said there was nothing like that, that the hospital never did any advertisement.

Anne my friend almost fainted, we couldn't believe our ears, we didn't know where to start from:

• Is it our last pocket money we had to spend in order to secure this job?

• Is it Anne and Deborah that travelled home to get their original WAEC certificates, also informing their parents about the goodnews?

• Is it the shame we where going back to the hostel to face after bragging about our forty thousand naira paid job?

• Is it our church cloths we wore in order to appear as smart as we could ever be or the classes we had missed for the day?

We didn't know what else to do, as sad and disappointed as we were we carried our bags and went back to cry in the hostel.

It wasn't funny because there was nobody to look up to for support as we all spent our last money.

That period, the worst any one could do was just to talk about that incident, we tried calling the woman's line for some days, but it was never on again.

We tried our best to heal the wound and move on, trust me it wasn't funny.

Personally it wasn't funny as I couldn't call my parents to tell them I was scammed or call to request for another money, I just had to try my best to manage myself in terms of feeding, thank God for my roommates then as they supported me, that was how I managed till my next pocket money came.

Ever since then, I have never fallen victim of any kind and will never fall again because it was an awful experience.

THINGS WE DIDN'T TAKE NOTE OF :

1. As people applying for job, we didn't even know what we were applying as, very funny right?

1. We were so much interested in our forty thousand naira salary that we didn't take note of the fact that if anything happens, there was no trace. The man Eunice met was someone she had just seen twice, someone that she was not sure of his identity or a particular place where we could find him.

1. The woman didn't ask us to send the money in her account, as we would have traced her with her bank account number.

1. Everything happened just so fast.

I hope you all learn from my experience, let's keep the comment section rolling.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks Hive account@swissclive for this opportunity, I hope you find this interesting.