In the latest incident on 20 August, a 14-year-old was skate- boarding with friends near Shoprite when unknown men came up to them. The suspects offered to pay them for helping to carry boxes of sanitising masks from a nearby home.
When the youngster volunteered, one of them asked him to hand over his cell phone so that he could put a sticker on it. He claimed that it would identify him as being part of the operation. When the man walked away with his cell phone, the child went after him to try and get his property back.
One of the other men pretended to help him look for his phone, but he, too, disappeared. The boy then realised he had been conned out of his Samsung Galaxy A20 phone.
According to the police, phones have been stolen in similar scams before. In one of them, the children were asked to help pack T-shirts for a bit of extra cash.
In the end, their advice is that children must be aware that there are such scams in town. They are warned never to hand their phones over to strangers.
