I JUST GOT A RECHARGE.........HOW GULLIBLE CAN NIGERIANS BE?
Greetings dear friend,
Nigerians are a very interesting set of people and quite frankly, they have a keen sense of humour. Undoubtedly, there is hardly a dull moment with them. Many times, I reflect on the pains and agony we go through daily as a people and yet manage to keep ourselves together without resorting to a full blown civil war. Many countries have disintegrated due to much lesser challenges than we have experienced. It shows that we are, generally speaking, A VERY TOLERANT and ACCOMODATING group of people. WE EASILY ACCEPT THINGS AS THEY ARE, MAKE OUR WAY AROUND CIRCUMSTANCES AND MAKE THE MOST OF OUR DIFFICULTIES. Though these are very nice attributes, the recession in Nigeria has exposed a major flaw inherent in many Nigerians even the educated ones: OUR TENDENCY TO MAKE THE MOST OF OUR DIFFICULTIES SEEMS TO BECLOUD OUR JUDGEMENT LEADING TO GREED AND ULTIMATELY MAKES US GULLIBLE TO MANY SCAMS!
This is the only valid conclusion I can draw from the plethora of scams and ridiculous links broadcasted by educated Nigerians on Whatsapp and other social media platforms. I mean, it is exasperating that such scams will even be broadcasted in the first place! This has nothing to do with recession or Buhari. This is plain expression of gullibility. Yesterday, I got a message as shown below:
I just got a recharge. You can try to get it too http://recharge-promotions.com
I knew what to expect, so I did not pay any heed to it. What company will just be distributing free recharge cards to everybody? As typical of my beloved country people, it spread like wildfire! In less than 1 hour, I have gotten that same message more than 50 times! Are you kidding me? All manner of people were sending me this crap. Youths, graduates, fathers and mothers, people working in respectable corporate organizations,etc. Now the simple question i asked those that my finger typed a response to was have you gotten yours? have you gotten your own recharge card, how much was it and what network? That question will always hit a brick wall or get a response along this line at best: TRY IT. But some are even worse off than the original scammers; They will go ahead to tell you that they have received their own recharge card. Such people have excised the last vestige of honesty from their character set.
Does this quickly remind you of the emirates airlines two tickets scam? Lol. In that plot, our phones were inundated with messages like this:
Only heaven knows the number of people that got the two free first class tickets promised.😕
A LITTLE INVESTIGATION REVEALS NIGERIANS ARE TOO GULLIBLE!
Just a little investigation and you will see that Nigerians are actually too gullible. This is no rocket science. Let us take the case of the recharge card.
The message comes thus:
I just got a recharge. You can try to get it too http://recharge-promotions.com
When you click the link, you are taken to a page where you are to fill in your phone number as shown below:
When you input your phone number and click on proceed to recharge, you are presented with a page that says YOU SHOULD SHARE THE PAGE WITH 10 WHATSAPP GROUPS TO CLAIM YOUR RECHARGE. It appears as shown below:
This should make it very clear that it is a scam! How does sharing the message in groups lead to airtime recharge? What monitoring system is in place to ensure that after sharing to 10 groups you get the recharge card? But you see, as a prove of been gullible and blinded by greed, people go ahead to share this message with all their groups and contacts. They in turn catch the bug and spread it even further and before long, your phone battery is drained, having been inundated with this scam message. One will expect such scam to be dead on arrival, but lest I forget, these people have a different set of scientific believes:
- You can charge your battery to 100% instantly by sending messages to 5 Whatsapp groups
- You can get 9gb of data on any network valid for 2 months by sending messages to whatsapp groups
- You can call and SMS for free by sending bulk messages to whatsapp groups
- You can get Whatsapp for free (WHICH WAS DECLARED FREE BY THE OWNERS MANY YEARS AGO) by sending bulk messages to groups.
- You need to send bulk messages to whatsapp groups to enable Whatsapp free calls video calls and private/anonymous chats
- You can activate Whatsapp without internet by clicking a link! The exact message they broadcast is sent thus:
Now,You can do Whatsapp Without Internet From Today. Whatsapp launches Ultra-Light Wifi Feature to Enjoy Free 3G Internet wherever you go for whatsapp application,Click On Below Link to Activate Now - http://ultra-wifi-activation.ml
