Camille Clarke

Over 10,000 peo­ple re­ceived the So­ma­li text mes­sages last week that claimed they would re­ceive a car or cash from the Cen­tral Bank of T&T.Mem­bers of the pub­lic said they had re­ceived sev­er­al text mes­sages over their cell­phones say­ing they had won $50,000 and telling them to vis­it the Cen­tral Bank for fur­ther in­for­ma­tion and to re­ceive the mon­ey.Scores of peo­ple went to the Cen­tral Bank, Port-of-Spain, on­ly to be turned away, dis­ap­point­ed.

Some of the mes­sages said: "Win­ner call now free and re­ceive your new car or it will be can­celled or trans­ferred to an­oth­er win­ner"; "Ur­gent ap­peal, get your car from the Di­rec­tor of­Tele­mar­ket­ing of T&T" and "Cen­tral Bank of T&T. You are in­vit­ed to re­ceive your check of $50,000. Call and learn about the place of re­ceipt."The phone num­bers are ten dig­its and have var­i­ous area codes.Many peo­ple vis­it­ed the bank at In­de­pen­dence Square and St Vin­cent Street, Port-of-Spain, hop­ing the mes­sages were gen­uine.

Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T man­ag­er, me­dia re­la­tions and cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions Gra­ham Suite yes­ter­day again urged mem­bers of the pub­lic to be wary and cau­tious of strangers send­ing text mes­sages to their phones."Peo­ple have to be vig­i­lant about of­fers and calls and the mes­sages they re­ceive," he said.Suite said the mes­sages came from So­ma­lia and the Unit­ed King­dom."Based on the in­ves­ti­ga­tions, the mes­sages were in­ter­na­tion­al and went through des­ig­nat­ed cen­tres which are known. Our in­ves­ti­ga­tions traced the mes­sages pass­ing through mes­sage cen­tres in So­ma­lia and more re­cent­ly from the Unit­ed King­dom."

But Suite said the mes­sages were chang­ing their point of ori­gin."We can't tell who are the spe­cif­ic per­sons in­volved, just the trend­ing of the mes­sage and the con­tent were sim­i­lar. That was how we recog­nised the pat­terns on how it orig­i­nat­ed and we blocked them from get­ting to cit­i­zens," he said.Suite said TSTT con­tin­ued to ad­vise mem­bers of the pub­lic to use their best judg­ment."Once you get a mes­sage like that and you didn't par­tic­i­pate in any pro­mo­tion and did not reg­is­ter, those are red flags. It is not le­git­i­mate. As ap­peal­ing as it sounds, any­thing like that rarely hap­pens," he said.He said TSTT would con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor the mes­sages.