Maïa Dunphy has shared a hilarious thread of her stringing along a scam artist who was pretending to be her child in the infamous ‘hi mum’ scam.
The ‘Hi mum’ scam, a relatively new scam text message that has cropped up, sees the potential scammer target victims by pretending to be their child. They then say that they’re texting off a new phone and are in serious trouble, before asking for money from the unsuspecting victim.
Thankfully, people have become aware of these scams going around — with Maïa, who was one of the latest targets, deciding to continuously change the subject with her ‘new child’.
In a hilarious thread on Twitter, Maïa’s ‘child’ told her that they needed to pay €921 for a new laptop — with Maia telling the scammer that she was out ‘nicking jocks off random washing lines’ and asking if they were coming home for the weekend as ‘Jim brought home that deer he ran over, so we’re going to barbecue it if the weather’s nice.’
Maïa then asked ‘can the nuns not help you?’ and told the scammer to pawn ‘the religious relic I gave you.’ But once the bank details were sent and swiftly deleted, Maïa decided to let them know the jig was up by telling the scammer they were going to put their name as ‘Scammy Hooer’ and report the crime to Gardaí.
Tweeting the last screenshot — where she revealed that she was blocked — Maïa still kept the invitation of the barbecued roadkill open, texting them one last time ‘will you still come over for barbecue Saturday? It’s a massive deer.’
People couldn’t get enough of Maïa scamming the scammers, with one person writing ‘I’m in floods Maïa. U really wound them up proper, absolutely love it!!!!’
Others said that they were targets of similar texts, with the only issue being that they’ve never actually had children, while another asked if the barbecue invitation was still available, joking ‘Loving your work! But are you serious about the deer cos I do enjoy a bit of venison.’
As for the scam itself, it’s become one of the more recent scam text messages that have tried to trick the masses.
The scammer will ask the potential victim to contact them on a temporary WhatsApp number, where they say they’re in danger and need money to get out of it.
‘This has been happening across the world for a few months but it has only started cropping up in Ireland recently,’ Niamh Davenport, head of the Financial Crime, Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland (BPFI) told the Journal back in December.
‘We would always say to think twice before sending money to a third party.’
