RHON­DOR DOWLAT 

The Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) is rais­ing aware­ness about a surge in scams tar­get­ing prospec­tive home­own­ers, with fraud­sters ex­ploit­ing the names and im­ages of HDC of­fi­cials to de­fraud un­sus­pect­ing cit­i­zens. 

These scams in­volve false promis­es of HDC homes, with fraud­sters de­mand­ing pay­ments to ex­pe­dite ap­pli­ca­tions or guar­an­tee hous­ing al­lo­ca­tions.

HDC spokesper­son Kim­ber­ly De Souza em­pha­sised that on­ly four le­git­i­mate ways ex­ist­ed to ob­tain an HDC home, pri­mar­i­ly through the of­fi­cial ran­dom se­lec­tion draw.

De Souza was speak­ing as the mas­ter of cer­e­monies at yes­ter­day’s HDC hous­ing lot­tery draw at the cor­po­ra­tion’s head­quar­ters in Port-of-Spain.

“Six­ty per cent of suc­cess­ful ap­pli­cants re­ceive their homes through our ran­dom se­lec­tion process,” De Souza ex­plained. “Any of­fer out­side of this, es­pe­cial­ly one in­volv­ing pay­ment, is not on­ly mis­lead­ing but al­so il­le­gal. We urge the pub­lic to stay alert.”

De Souza fur­ther high­light­ed the tac­tics scam­mers use to gain the pub­lic’s trust, in­clud­ing im­per­son­at­ing HDC man­agers. “Some of these fraud­sters go as far as us­ing the names and ti­tles of re­al HDC em­ploy­ees to make their schemes seem cred­i­ble,” she not­ed. “But re­mem­ber, the HDC will nev­er ask you to meet some­one in a park­ing lot or make a pay­ment any­where oth­er than an of­fi­cial HDC of­fice.”

The HDC has al­so seen cas­es where scam­mers dis­trib­ute coun­ter­feit doc­u­ments claim­ing to be from the cor­po­ra­tion. These fake forms of­ten re­quest sen­si­tive per­son­al in­for­ma­tion or pay­ments, aim­ing to ex­ploit ap­pli­cants who may not be aware of HDC’s stan­dard pro­ce­dures.

“If you are ap­proached with any un­usu­al re­quest—whether for a fee to fast-track an ap­pli­ca­tion or to fill out a sus­pi­cious-look­ing form—please re­mem­ber that these are red flags,” De Souza ad­vised.

She strong­ly ad­vised any­one who sus­pects they’ve fall­en vic­tim to a scam to con­tact the HDC di­rect­ly at 612-7432, ex­ten­sion 4801. “If you’ve made a pay­ment through bank trans­fer, call your bank im­me­di­ate­ly to at­tempt to halt the trans­ac­tion,” she added. Vic­tims are al­so en­cour­aged to re­port in­ci­dents to lo­cal au­thor­i­ties by call­ing the po­lice at 999 or vis­it­ing the near­est sta­tion.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, she warned of a trou­bling trend of il­le­gal oc­cu­pan­cy in HDC units.

“We want to re­mind every­one that oc­cu­py­ing an HDC unit with­out prop­er au­tho­ri­sa­tion is tres­pass­ing,” De Souza said.

“We want all ap­pli­cants to go through the prop­er process and keep their in­for­ma­tion up­dat­ed in our sys­tem for a fair chance at home own­er­ship.”