PETALING JAYA: An outing for three international school students here recently ended on a sour note when they were conned of their wallets, smartphones and other personal belongings worth RM5,000 in total.
The episode is not an isolated case and serves as a grim reminder how crooks are preying on unsuspecting youngsters in public places.
The boys, all aged 13, went to play futsal at the rooftop of 1 Utama here and after the game they went to a shoe outlet when a smartly dressed man approached them and accused them of assaulting a boy the previous day.
One of the parents who wanted to be anonymous told Bernama that the man then asked the three boys to put their smartphones, ipods and wallets into one of the sports bags they were carrying and to follow him to a nearby restaurant.
There the man split the trio, taking two of them to the cinema upstairs on the pretext of identification purpose and the other to a fast food outlet downstairs, leaving the bags at the restaurant.
At the fast food outlet, the boy met his friend’s father who coincidentally was waiting there and told him what was happening and both rushed up to the restaurant.
The two other boys also suspected that something was amiss and had rushed down to the same restaurant.
By then, the man had disappeared and so had their valuables.
A CCTV recording at the restaurant showed the man retrieving the bags from the counter staff and walking away. A report was lodged with the Damansara police station and the mall’s security unit.
As the parents were very concerned about the incident, they investigated further on their own and found that several other teenagers were also tricked using similar modus operandi at two other shopping malls in the Klang Valley before and after the incident. — Bernama