Lost in Translation

Ramila Mistry

It was Monthi Serrao’s turn to spring a surprise today. Soon after the exercises, she demanded out of the blue: “What is this about Ramila Mistry? She was crying on the phone… Somebody seems to have done some fraud on her… She does not know what to do!”
None of us had any clue of what she was saying. All we knew was that Ramila suffers from a serious knee problem which prevents her from walking / standing for too long and that was why she had stopped coming to the Garden to exercise. But what was this about fraud and crying on the phone? This was news to us.
“Did you get the phone call?” Srichand Arora asked Monthi pointedly.

Monthi narrates the phone scam

“Yes, it came on my WhatsApp.”
So this wasn’t a phone call after all, but a text message. Obviously, there was no weeping or howling either. Jagmohan Papneja and Bihari Milwani instantly dismissed it as a common cell-phone scam (they too had received similar alerts) but Monthi insisted she would bring her phone on Monday to prove she was serious.
She went on to elaborate that Ramila had received a call from her mobile service provider, advising her to switch off her phone for a couple of hours due to some technical upgrade. After two hours, when Ramila switched on her phone, she discovered a series of pending ‘missed calls’ from her friends and relatives. Upon returning the calls, she learnt that someone had impersonated her and in her voice, cried and pleaded frantically for financial assistance to bail her out of some distressful situation. Or so was Monthi made to believe.
Clearly, the WhatsApp account had been hacked. But upon contacting Ramila Mistry, another story emerged. None of this happened, but she had only forwarded a cautionary message to all her contacts describing the modus operandi of scamsters. And Monthi, in all her simplicity, had mistaken it as Ramila being the “victim of some fraud”. But again, it is always wiser to err on the side of caution.
Jagmohan Papneja:
WhatsApp fake messages are spreading like wildfire. If you receive such messages, ignore them and do not to share with anyone.