Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

In ad­di­tion to Face­book Mar­ket­place rob­beries and fraud­u­lent “rent-to-own” scams, po­lice are al­so warn­ing the pub­lic to be wary of an emerg­ing trend where crim­i­nals are trick­ing peo­ple in­to buy­ing coun­ter­feit US cur­ren­cy.

The warn­ing was is­sued by head of the North-Cen­tral Di­vi­sion, Snr Supt Vern­ly Gift, dur­ing a po­lice town hall meet­ing at the Ex­o­dus Pa­n­yard, on the East­ern Main Road, St Au­gus­tine, on Wednes­day night.

Gift not­ed that in­ci­dents where peo­ple were lured in­to rob­beries by ad­ver­tis­ing items for sale via Face­book mar­ket­place were a ma­jor con­cern to po­lice na­tion­wide, not­ing that there have been oth­er scams where fraud­sters so­licit­ed mon­ey via bank trans­fer for gold jew­ellery.

One sim­i­lar scam, he said, was the trend of peo­ple col­lect­ing mon­ey up­front in ex­change for coun­ter­feit US dol­lars.

He said while there would be a high de­mand for US cur­ren­cy in light of re­port­ed short­ages, peo­ple should not take un­nec­es­sary risks by try­ing to source funds out­side of rep­utable fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions.

“We know based on the econ­o­my, there’s a short­age of US cur­ren­cy in terms of for­eign ex­change, and we are see­ing peo­ple tak­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ac­quire US cur­ren­cy by any means... I sus­pect any means nec­es­sary.

“They are mak­ing arrange­ments to buy US cur­ren­cy, black mar­ket as we may want to call it, in­stead of go­ing to the recog­nised fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions to get the US cur­ren­cy. And by do­ing that, they are risk­ing giv­ing up their gen­uine TT dol­lars for US cur­ren­cy that turns out to be false or coun­ter­feit.

“All these are is­sues we are treat­ing with, but the po­lice will con­tin­ue to ed­u­cate and ad­vise and en­cour­age you, not on­ly res­i­dents of Tu­na­puna but cit­i­zens of T&T, to en­gage the recog­nised fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions in or­der to ac­quire US cur­ren­cy or any oth­er for­eign cur­ren­cy you choose to buy.”

Dur­ing his open­ing re­marks, Gift re­port­ed that the num­ber of mur­ders for the year in the di­vi­sion thus far rose slight­ly, with four mur­ders re­port­ed up to Wednes­day evening, com­pared to two in 2025 and nine in 2024.

He said that of the four mur­ders this year, two were the re­sult of a dou­ble mur­der, while the re­main­ing two were due to ar­gu­ments.

“I can tell you in the North-Cen­tral Di­vi­sion, most of the mur­ders we have record­ed so far for the year have to do with al­ter­ca­tions and dis­putes, not on­ly among res­i­dents of Tu­na­puna, but peo­ple who find them­selves in the Tu­na­puna area for what­ev­er rea­son.”

Gift said all mur­ders were con­cern­ing to the po­lice, re­gard­less of the mo­tive, and said ef­forts to quell fur­ther in­stances of vi­o­lence would con­tin­ue at the com­mu­ni­ty lev­el.

He re­port­ed that an­oth­er cat­e­go­ry of crime, which al­so rose for the year thus far was ve­hic­u­lar thefts in Tu­na­puna, with 14 re­ports of Lar­ce­ny Mo­tor Ve­hi­cle (LMV) com­pared to 13 re­ports last year.

Gift not­ed that the ve­hi­cles of choice for crim­i­nals were Toy­ota Aquas, Nis­san Ti­idas, Hon­da City cars, as well as Hyundai H100 and Kia K2700 vans.

He stressed that while he was not en­dors­ing the pur­chase of any par­tic­u­lar de­vice, ve­hi­cles equipped with GPS track­ing sys­tems were sta­tis­ti­cal­ly shown to have high­er rates of re­cov­ery.

“It is high­ly like­ly the ve­hi­cle would be re­cov­ered... in some in­stances, you can shut it down.

“We want to en­cour­age you... or you en­cour­age your neigh­bours to bet­ter se­cure their ve­hi­cles.

Oth­er cat­e­gories of crime which were de­clin­ing were sex­u­al of­fences, which dropped from sev­en in 2025 to four in 2026, and kid­nap­pings fell from one in 2025 to ze­ro in 2026