Food catering the new fraud trend on social media

Compiled by JUNAID IBRAHIM, C. ARUNO and R. ARAVINTHAN

SEVERAL Internet users from Seremban, Ipoh and Johor Baru have recently fallen prey to scammers claiming to offer food catering services, reported Sin Chew Daily.

Chen Xue Yin, 30, said she saw an advertisement on a Facebook group offering daily catering services.

She ordered a package offering three dishes, soup and rice for RM400 per month, but after paying a deposit of RM50 to the bank account number provided, Xue Yin found that she could no longer get in touch with the supposed caterer.

After waiting several days, she was resigned to the fact that she had been scammed.

“Even though RM50 isn’t a large sum, it is still our hard-earned money,” she wrote on Facebook.

Xue Yin added that she has yet to make a police report.

Another victim was Chen, 26, from Hong Kong, who is living in Ipoh.

After being disappointed that none of the caterers in Ipoh delivered to her neighbourhood, she jumped at the opportunity when an online advertisement claimed it did.

After paying RM80 to a woman on Facebook, Chen found that her messages no longer received any replies.

“When I realised they were ignoring me on WhatsApp, I knew immediately that I had been scammed,” she said.

> A 10-year-old girl selling sweet potatoes in a bid to raise funds for her younger sister’s medical bills is tugging at the heartstrings of Internet users in China, reported China Press.

A video of the little girl manning a sweet potato stall while scribbling away at what is presumed to be her homework went viral on Chinese social media.

A wooden board next to the stall had a message that read “Hello everyone. My name is Mei Mei and I live in Yiyuan county in Shandong’s Zibo city. My sister was diagnosed with acute leukaemia in May and requires 200,000 yuan (RM130,211). She is currently receiving treatment at the Jinan Shandong Hospital.”

In an interview, Mei Mei’s mother revealed that after finding out about her younger daughter’s illness, her husband quit his job.

The two of them brought their daughter to Jinan to receive treatment and have spent around 200,000 yuan on medical bills so far, she said.

She added that Mei Mei remains in Zibo and is currently under the care of her grandmother.

She helps her grandmother sell sweet potatoes at the market every day after school.

After the video went viral, an Internet user reportedly bought 251 bags of sweet potatoes from Mei Mei.

The above articles are compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a >, it denotes a separate news item.