Sunday, October 23, 2005

Lecturer Conned

I'm not sure what to think of the quality of lecturers in our public universities when you read news reports like this:
A senior university lecturer was cheated of RM600,000 by a syndicate who duped her into believing that they had inherited millions of dollars belonging to an African leader who had died recently.
I would have thought that these types of con will typically victimise those who aren't particularly intelligent. Even if the lecturer couldn't smell the well worked con, surely, she should have read about plenty of silly sob stories of individuals being suckered by the standard highly-placed-official-died routine!
The lecturer agreed to fork out RM100,000 and handed over the money to one of the syndicate members in Kuala Lumpur to “fulfil one of the conditions”. These included “donations” to charities in Africa and also for services rendered.

The lecturer was also asked to pay for a chemical that would purportedly clean the money of black ink, which was used to discolour the cash to make them easier to smuggle into the country. The lecturer borrowed RM500,000 from her friend, who mortgaged his house to secure a bank loan.
I'm more concerned that a "senior" lecturer "educating" our university students than the fact that she lost RM600,000. The "loss" impact on our students could be much higher than that!!

6 comments:

Golf Afflicted said...

This has nothing to do with private tuition at all.

I'm also not saying that lecturers and teachers are infallible. However, I would definitely expect lecturers to only fall for more sophisticated cons than the routine "highly-placed-official-died" email story which I receive at least twice a day! And black money... how long has it been going on and constantly repeated in the press?

I expect lecturers of our universities to have some brains, and not fall for the silliest of cons (how about some magic stones?). I worry for the students.

Tony P

Anonymous said...

I also receive such email from time to time, and I just delete them straight away!

As the saying goes, "there is no free lunch".

This "Black money" is a scam.

It should be highlighted in mass media so people will not fall prey to this type of scam.

Being socially encultured or brought up in Malaysia or South-east Asia Malay Archipelago, we are used to the stories of so-called "black magic", pontianak, or "ilmu hitam" andwhatever, we are very sceptic to this type of "black money".

These emails would only serve one thing----I grow to be more sceptic of you people whom come from the particular continent.

Dont say I am bias. It's straight and simple. You people start the scam. You are mere asking people to take a second look on you!

You sow what you reap. Period.

clk said...

Without knowing the details of the Uni-lecturer, I suggest ACA & IRB also investigates into how a Uni-Lecturer can accumulate RM 600K.

A lecturer's paycheck is public knowledge and RM 600k by any standard in M'sia is a lot of money!

He/She may have other source(s) of income which hopefully is also reported to the IRB!

Anonymous said...

Good point, CLK! Maybe the lecturer really is smart at making money. But greedy and dumb enough to fall for that scam.

I too shudder at the thought of such lecturers. Imagine, how'd you feel about that person teaching your kids?

If I'm not mistaken, there was another lecturer whose e-mail Tony showed us in another blog post. Something about professors publishing papers to get promotions.

Someone commented about that lecturer's muddled writing and thought process. Don't mean to be unkind, but I can see the commenter's point now!

Jaxon S said...

know what...i enjoy reading all those e-mails from people who are so eager to make me rich. i like to see the tricks re-told again and again, each with a slight variation.. it's entertaining to see how people invent and spawn a trick!

fishtail said...

Ditto Jaxons' comment. I have received half a dozen 'offers' already and should be a multi-millionaire by now. First there was the 'my father was murdered' story, then a Spanish lottery, then another sob-sob 'father murdered' story, another lottery good-news story ... the list goes on. Really dumb lecturer, that.