The Jazz Prize Scam

Last morning, a friend of mine received an unexpected call from a Mobilink cell phone number and was stunned to know that he had won half a million rupees in a SIM draw prize scheme held by Mobilink. My friend was not out of his happy surprise when he came to me, still talking to the person who had called him, and asking me to talk to him. It was not 8:30 yet and I was surprised to think of a cell phone office staff arriving so early. You may have guessed by now that it was a phishing scam! But let’s complete the story.

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The person calling himself Ali Raza claimed that he was speaking from Mobilink’s head office in Karachi and asked me if my friend had a bank account. I told him he didn’t and asked him what kind of prize scheme it was that suddenly was making my friend rich (half a million in no time and without any effort). The fellow said that it was a Jazz SIM number draw that had resulted in my friend’s number as the winner of five hundred thousand rupees; and that the winner would receive his money in three hours at any bank we choose in our city. This confirmed my suspicion since only superman could be quick enough to deliver it that fast, and I knew for sure that Christopher Reeve was long dead. Besides, the Mobilink website showed its head office in Islamabad, not in Karachi.

The scammer had already given my friend a number to call back at in order to complete the prize delivery procedure. As he hung up, I cautioned my friend against it and while he went out to load credit to his phone account, I connected the internet and searched for ‘Jazz SIM Draw Scam’. There it was! At least half a dozen places had reported it including the complete narrative of a similar case happening to a person who had followed the process and discovered that the scammer asks you to send them a sum of 3000 rupees via cell phone credit transfer method, followed by requests for more money in order to get your grand prize – the hypothetical half a million or one million rupees.

The reports of such scamming by people using Jazz numbers are at least two years old and at least some people have fallen a victim to these scams. One of them even shared the numbers from which he received the scamming calls. Whether Mobilink is taking any measures to prevent such scams committed in their name is not certain. But my friend did escape the trap, thanks to the helpful blog posts about such scamming, and we had a good laugh about the matter a while later. To all those who receive any such call with a happy surprise, beware of losing your money in the hope of making a lot of it as a prize. There is no free lunch!