Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

A 47-year-old Arou­ca man was ar­rest­ed and ex­pect­ed to be charged yes­ter­day, af­ter he re­port­ed­ly ac­cept­ed a quan­ti­ty of cash from a man, but failed to pro­vide him with a van that he claimed to have for sale.

Po­lice said the vic­tim paid $74,000 to the sus­pect in Ju­ly 2025 for the pur­chase of a Nis­san pan­el van.

The vic­tim lat­er told po­lice that the sus­pect, whom he knows, claimed the ve­hi­cle was at the Port-of-Spain port and he was pre­pared to sell it to him at a dis­count.

The sus­pect al­leged­ly not­ed that the cash was for tax­es, du­ties and oth­er ad­min­is­tra­tive fees.

The vic­tim even­tu­al­ly re­port­ed the in­ci­dent to po­lice af­ter months passed, and he made sev­er­al un­suc­cess­ful at­tempts to con­tact the ven­dor.

Of­fi­cers of the Fraud Squad ar­rest­ed the sus­pect on Sun­day af­ter­noon and took him to their San­gre Grande of­fice.

In­ves­ti­ga­tors said the sus­pect has been charged over 100 times for sim­i­lar fraud of­fences over the years.

Po­lice are urg­ing the pub­lic to be ex­treme­ly cau­tious when pur­chas­ing items from strangers, es­pe­cial­ly items ad­ver­tised for sale at sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er prices than re­tail cost.

An of­fi­cer said, “Usu­al­ly, when you see items be­ing put for sale at a price that’s too good to be true, it usu­al­ly is.

“If you know you are buy­ing some­thing and they can’t give you the de­tails like the li­cence plate or even be­ing able to vis­it the item to see it for your­self, you have to be cau­tious and maybe avoid that trans­ac­tion al­to­geth­er.”

In the case of ve­hi­cles, the of­fi­cer al­so urged the pub­lic to buy ve­hi­cles from rep­utable au­to­mo­bile deal­ers, not­ing that there were risks at­tached to buy­ing “sec­ond-hand” ve­hi­cles from pri­vate peo­ple, as it was pos­si­ble that the per­son plac­ing the ve­hi­cles for sale may not be au­tho­rised to do so.