It is not easy to make a living as a hawker.
Much less when customers are out to scam you.
One Indian zichar (stir-fry dishes) stall owner was scammed of $27,000 by a customer who pretended to pay after ordering a lot of food and wine.
Here is what happened to him.
Indian Zichar Owner Was Scammed of $27,000
The zichar owner who is the victim of this scam is the owner of The Little Blacky Seafood (direct translation from Chinese) zichar stall.
The stall is located at Block 603 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5.
The stall owner, a 40-year-old man, recounted to Shin Min how he fell victim to a scam by a customer. He had previously gone viral online for his good grasp of Mandarin and other Chinese dialects.
On a Sunday evening at around 9 pm, the stall owner received an order from a customer who claimed to be a staff at a primary school.
This customer wanted to order food for a celebratory banquet for some primary school staff members the following evening.
The customer said that the primary school’s vice principal had asked for five tables’ worth of food to be prepared and tip-top ingredients at that.
Apart from the food, the customer also wanted the stall owner to order red wine for the banquet. The customer provided the wine supplier’s contact to the stall owner.
At first, the order for wine was a mere five boxes of red wine, valued at $500 each. Each box of wine contained six bottles of red wine.
However, the customer changed their story a while later, saying that the number of people attending the banquet increased.
The customer asked the stall owner to prepare 20 boxes of red wine.
The total cost of the food and wine ordered was up to $14,795.
Customer Pretended to Have Sent the Payment but Retracted the Statement Later
After the stall owner told the customer the total cost of their order, the customer claimed to have transferred the money to the stall owner’s bank account.
However, the stall owner did not see any money come in. Upon further probing, the customer claimed that the invoices were still being processed by the relevant departments and the money would be released in the next two hours.
In the meantime, the customer said that they wanted to order another 16 boxes of wine.
The stall owner duly made the orders and paid the suppliers for the wine. He then passed the invoice to the customer for payment.
However, it was then that the stall owner found out that the customer and the red wine supplier both deleted their contacts and fell out of contact.
It was at that point that the stall owner realised he was scammed. He estimated his loss at about $27,000 in total.
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