An elderly Westdene resident's heart sank when she realised she wasn't a winner and that she had been conned.
“I feel so stupid and embarrassed for falling for the scam,”she told NMT.
“I would like to warn other residents not to fall for the same trick I did.”
The lady, who asked to remain anonymous, was doing her shopping at a local Woolworths Food store when a man in his mid-twenties approached her.
“He asked whether the man standing not to far from us was the guy from the SABC who gave away prizes when people spotted him. I obviously didn't know him.”
The younger man then approached the older man, and the two, who it turned out were in cahoots, put up a brilliant show to convince the lady she was the winner of shopping vouchers to the value of R1500.
The cash she had on her person, in addition, would be matched in a cash prize. The catch? She had to draw money from the ATM to increase her winnings.
The two managed to convince the lady to leave the store and wait at a nearby coffee shop while they ostenibly went to verify whether the bundle of bank notes she had handed them weren't fake.
“Needless to say, they never returned,”she added.
“I went home and I wept. It was a lot of money for an older person.”
Woolworths staff were able to pick up the conmen on CCTV footage and offered to send images to Linden police, who will investigate the mater further.
The lady spotted one of the conmen at another shopping centre and is convinced that they are targeting older residents while they do their groceries.
She said the older man appeared to be in his late thirties and underweight, while the younger man wore an orange t-shirt.
