Victimized - Almost

An elderly, retired senior went to a (overseas) shopping mall one day. After purchasing some goods and went for his lucky draw, he was told he has won the 1st prize of a car. Excited, he made arrangement to process his prize item. He was told that in order to claim for his prize, he has to pay "GST" first. He can arrange to transfer his "GST" amount to xxxx. A phone number was given to him for any clarification. Since the elderly senior did not have the means to pay for the GST at that point of time, he went home and told his children about it. His children told him it may be a scam as that country does not have GST! and besides there is no proper documentation or letter-head document to state the obvious and conditions to accept the prize.

The moral of this incident is ...if you have to part with your real money first before you can receive your prize item or money, then something is, most likely, wrong with the transaction.

Calling all durian lovers (Victimized)

May 10th, 2007

Is there such thing as free sampling? The answer is "Yes" and "No". When visiting any durian store in Singapore, be careful of the vendors offering you "free" sample of their stock of durians. They may jump a surprise on you after you have tasted them. They said that the durians they have "opened" have to be bought by you at ridiculous price of $20/kg. They continue to say aggressively that they have opened the fruit and have already keyed in the purchase. You may be put into a very difficult situation and, like all Singaporean, trying to avoid trouble will reluctantly purchase one piece of durian from them at $62!

This hard-sell tactics deployed by some stall-holders are disgusting.