My brother-in-law called me this morning, asking if I was okay, and where I was just now, sometime nearing to lunch time. Apparently, someone, admitting that he is from Indonesian Embassy in Singapore, made a call to my family back in Jakarta, telling them that I was involved in a car accident and now am in hospital. He told my brother-in-law that I am now in this so-and-so hospital, the accident was somewhere in the east side of Singapore, and gave my brother-in-law his contact number in Singapore.
Whoever this person is, is not anyone who anyhow picked phone numbers for prank calls. He certainly know my full name, my father’s name, that I am in Singapore, and my parents work number. However, he certainly didn’t know that my brother-in-law stayed in Singapore for a number of years to know well enough that so-and-so hospital doesn’t exist, and that “somewhere” doesn’t exist in Singapore either. Moreover, my brother-in-law stayed in east side of Singapore with my sister for over a year. Also, giving a Singapore contact number that starts with “2″ is simply a give-away. Guess he doesn’t know that Singapore only has “6″, “8″ and “9″ to start with.
However, they couldn’t take a chance, they called me, asking me if I am okay, sounded a bit panic I could say. My sister SMS-ed me few hours later, and my mom called me around 7 pm afterwards. Thanks everyone for your concern. Just in case, my sister asked for a phone number they could call in the case of emergency or “emergency”, so I gave my sister one of my friend’s phone number whom I know will know my whereabouts enough anytime, anyday.
Thinking further, what could be the motivation behind this call? Prank calls or calls with some malicious intent behind? There are two things that we could think of this situation. First, someone really was involved in a car accident, his IC number is very similar to mine, and the embassy wrongly picked up details and made the call. However, giving away wrong hospital name, accident area, and wrong phone numbers rule out this possibility.
Second, is the one that one of my colleague told me, was that they made this kind of call, knowing what are the times that someone abroad (in this case, me) couldn’t pick up the phone. They, of course, somehow already had details about my particulars, my emergency contact person and number, so on and so on. Then, they would tell all these stories, and in the end was to ask the emergency-contact-person to transfer some money into Singapore (into their account I’m sure) so they could help that someone abroad to pay up the hospital’s bill. How someone would actually believe them and transfer the money, or how they could actually convince their victim is simply beyond me. However, this is what my colleague told me, not a new thing that actually has happened in Indonesia, and seemed to be the most making-sense answer we could think of right now.
If there’s any other possibility that you may know, think of, or simply had experienced it before, I would be eager to know them.
So, the next time you called back home to your parents, let them know not to fall into this kind of trap.
Originally posted at http://hendrikch.tabulas.com/2005/11/30/@1066163/
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