Prisoners Robbing Citizens from Their Prison Cells

Prisoners have discovered a new method of robbery: they are committing crime from their prison cells by means of mobile phones, forcing citizens to top up their credit on their mobile phones. The scam is as follows:

The prisoner calls a few random numbers and then sends an sms with the following text (the text is the same as those ‘Magti’’ or ‘Geocell’ are sending): “+526 is informing you, that 5 GEL was transferred to your account from the number 899 XXXX. The fee of transfer, 15 tetris will be removed from your account”. After that, the prisoner asks the owner of the number, to call him back, saying that he had made a mistake and transferred money to the wrong number – "I wanted to send money to a patient in hospital", says the inmate. Then he asks the owner to send the money back to his number. The citizen returns the money. The reality is that the prisoner never sent any money to the number and is scamming the citizen.

We know the phone number of one of these scam artists is  899 298613.

The Ministry of Justice has forbidden the use of mobile phones by prisoners, after various crimes were committed by cell phones. Hundreds of mobile phones were taken from prisoners; however cell phones, drugs and other prohibited items still exist within the prisons.

We asked the head of Penitentiary Department to comment on the situation, although he refused to do so. Before this new method of robbery, the prisoners were scamming people using other means. They would call citizens, saying that their number has won prize (like a washing machine, iron, TV etc.) To claim the prize, according to the scammers, the citizens should buy a phone card of 20 or 30 GEL, and dictate the code to them. The information about this scam spread in Tbilisi quite quickly and now citizens doubt such calls. It seems however that the prisoners have found a new way of scamming our citizens.

Eka Gulua