Free City Card? Alarming Details

A free seat card for public transport in the Warsaw metropolitan area? An offer you can’t refuse, so first come, first served. But be careful: it’s too good to be true. The Karta Transportowa Warszawa profile, which you can find on Facebook, is an attempt at fraud. It works very simply.

The Warsaw Transport Card is a scam

You have to go to the website and take part in a simple contest: answer 3 questions about whether you use public transport in Warsaw, and then click on one of several boxes displayed on the screen. Some of them contain a hidden prize.

As you can easily guess: it is impossible not to win this competition, so you are congratulated on winning a card, which you will receive after you provide your personal data and pay for shipping. These are areas of the Internet that I did not have the courage to venture into, so I did not reach this stage and I also warn you not to do so. Providing personal data on random sites is always asking for trouble, because you do not know how the fraudsters will use this data. And you will never see the money sent back – just like the card.

Someone will say that the offer looks credible, because the Facebook profile contains opinions of satisfied Warsaw residents who have won such a card. A quick glance at the foreign-sounding names of the alleged winners is enough to be sure that these are some purchased, and therefore completely unreliable profiles.

Fraud happens every day

We regularly write about scams that are not “technically” difficult at all, but turn out to be very effective. Here we warn against excessive trust in buyers on sales platforms: scammers love Blik. Here, in turn, we described the story of a man who convinced pensioners that he would carry out window maintenance, charged a few hundred złoty for it, and the effect was far from expected. In this text, we write about how paying with someone else’s card can end – even if it was not stolen, but found.