It’s considered a noble gesture to offer a lift to someone standing by the road-side especially if they raise a hand to ask for it from a car passing by. With the current trend of con artists, you could land in trouble for a noble gesture. Con artists each day come up with different tricks in which they can extort money from people. John (name withheld), a driver for a government entity, was driving from his home to work when a lady waved her hand asking for a lift. The father of three offered the lady a lift without knowing that he was going to experience the worst nightmare of his life. When John was narrating his ordeal one would think it’s an episode from a soap opera or series commonly know as Hustle, a British television drama series. He said: “The woman was smartly dressed that one could not associate her with the terrible act of conning. She appeared to be married and a family woman since she had on an engagement ring and a wedding ring. The first thing I asked her was where she was going and she told me it was Kacyiru and yet that was the same direction I was headed.”Getting to know that they were heading to the same direction, John didn’t hesitate to offer her a lift and they started chatting along the way.“I asked her about her family and she said that her two daughters go to Rivera High School and her husband went abroad for further studies. But since my focus was on the road I did not realize that she had gotten rid of the engagement and wedding rings. To my surprise she told me to pull over at a bus stop which I did immediately,” John narrates. He added that the woman started shouting, asking for payment for her services. “She started screaming and caused a lot of commotion that people started surrounding the car. She was demanding for Rwf150, 000 in relation to the weekend services (in terms of sexual relations) she had offered me. I was shocked and embraced,” he recalls. He said that since it was a Monday, most people around the bus stop believed the woman given her physical appearance not until a group of ladies approached him to explain what exactly happened. “These women came to my rescue and I told them to call my wife using their own phones to ask her whether I had not spent the whole weekend with her. I told them my name and they called her and she confirmed that I had just left home to go to work in about 10minutes. It’s after the women had finished talking to my wife that the woman (con artist) crossed the road and jumped on a taxi motorcycle and left,” John narrated. This shows how con artists can go to the extreme in order to extort money from innocent people. What could have happened if these other women had not put John aside to get his side of the coin?Don’t let appearance mislead you in relation to what people can do for money. Watch out when offering a stranger a lift you can’t tell their motives, probably you might not be as lucky as John was.
