A member of the Tangerang City Council, Mulyadi, got taken by one of the oldest tricks in the book last week when he handed over the keys to his shiny sports car last week to a man in a pilot’s uniform.
Mulyadi was attempting to sell off his flashy Toyota FT 86 sports car and went to meet with his prospective buyer at the parking lot of Terminal 2 at Soekarno-Hatta Airport.
The potential purchaser, identified by police by his initials MY, was wearing a pilot’s uniform and claimed to work for a national airline.
“When we met at the airport, he was wearing a complete pilot’s uniform. He was also wearing a name tag, Andi Muhammad Yusuf. We settled on a price of Rp 575 million,” Mulyadi told Tribunnews.
Confident that he was dealing with a trustworthy aviator, Mulyadi handed his keys over to “Andi” when the con-artist asked to test drive the car, by himself.
After waiting for MY to come back with his car, and then realizing that MY was never going to come back with his car after repeated attempts to call him went unanswered, Mulyadi finally reported the incident to the Soekarno-Hatta Airport police.
Luckily for the Tangerang legislator, police were able to trace MY’s inactive phone and eventually tracked him and the car down in Sleman, Central Java.
Police said that MY had run the same scam successfully several times before and that he could face up to four years in prison for fraud.
