More Scams Through Television Now

We all are aware of the famous Nigerian Scams. Then there is a scam where you get cheated after getting convinced to change your Mobile Phone talk time plan. While this was not enough, I came across another scam. This scam is done through television. I was aware of such scams before but was never convinced that they are cheating people. I got cheated by these TV channels a few days ago. The channel is called E24. This channel hosts a lot of contests which are easy to win. For e.g. They will cover half face of a very famous actor or actress and then ask us to guess the actor. These guys themselves make fake calls and provide wrong answers to make people believe that this is real. Couple of days ago there was such competition going on. The challenge was to guess the actress and even a kid would guess that she is the famous actress from Bollywood Madhuri Dixit. These guys give a phone number and ask us to hold for very long. They say that the person who holds the line for maximum time will have a chance to win this contest. The contest prize money kept on increasing as people were giving wrong answers and some of them got disconnected. It was really hard to believe that people did not know it was Madhuri Dixit. This program was called Bollywood Dhamal and the prize money was Rs 95,000.

The calls people make on these shows are charged from Rs 7 to Rs 10 per minute. This means, you can easily lose upto Rs 50 or more in such calls as they never answer your call. All they ask is to keep waiting or keep trying again. After doing some research, I found out that NOONE has yet won these contests. This is just a SCAM to make money for themeselves. These TV show owners tie up with network operators. They get a share of the money we spent on dialling these numbers which cost us HUGE money. There was another show on ESPN called STUMPED which I came across recently. The stumped show always concidered me lucky after going through their menu three times. They said they will call me as I am lucky but I never got the call. Why am I always lucky after going through the menu three times? Because I am spending my time and paying for the call charges out of which these scammers get some portion. They also make money by asking us to send SMS. They also say that person who sends most SMS has chance to win. I am sure there are people who waste 100s and 1000s on such scammers. Have you ever got paid by such TV shows? Post in comments to provie me wrong.