An Indonesian woman has faked her own death and posted photos of her “corpse” on her daughter’s Facebook account in order to avoid having to pay back cash she had borrowed from an online friend.
Liza Dewi Pramita had taken out a loan of IDR 4.2 million, which is worth just GBP 225, from her online friend Maya Gunawan and was supposed to pay the cash back on 20th November.
The two women had got to know each other and started talking online in a social media group where people gather together and often pool resources for community loans for any one of a number of reasons.
As the other people in the group insisted that Pramita was reliable and trustworthy, and she also made a good impression, Maya decided to lend her money.
When the payback did not happen as discussed, Pramita asked for an extension until early December, but that also came and went with no sign of the money.
But when Maya started to think about demanding it back, she was shocked to see that Pramita had “died” when she logged in to Facebook and saw a posting from the woman’s daughter.
The post claimed Pramita had died in a car crash on a bridge near her house in Medan which is the capital of the Indonesian province of North Sumatra. It further said that she would be buried around 600 km away from home.
The post also had photographs of Pramita, shrouded, with cotton in her nostrils. Another photo showed a dead body being wheeled away in a hospital.
But it turned out that Pramita had arranged the pictures to be taken herself.
The footage showing her being wheeled away was taken from the TV series, and her own daughter knew nothing about the posting, with her mother apparently hijacking the account in order to make news of her death public.
Maya said that she was initially upset at losing the money, but was sadder at the tragic loss of the young woman.
However, she became suspicious when she took on board that the burial was to take place hundreds of kilometres away.
She then noticed that the supposedly dead woman did not appear to be that dead, and the final confirmation came when she discovered a picture supposedly from the hospital was an online stock image.
Furious at being conned, she went online to complain when Pramita’s daughter then responded to say that she had not posted the message.
However, there is no immediate happy end in sight as Pramita has now really vanished, with no information about when or if the money will ever be repaid.
