But after one year of following up on every turn and twist of the shylock rip-off, he finally saw light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

"I saw an advertisement saying that people could recover money lost in shylock schemes and I decided to seek the agency's help", he says.

The advert that attracted Mogapi's attention read in part: "Have you invested your money in shylock schemes and they have closed their offices or retrenched, have failed to pay you, have cheated you with excuses? Stop the stories and excuses! Recover your money now!"

Thus when he stepped into an office on Gaborone's Broadhurst Tlhware road, Mogapi was confident that his tribulations were about to end.

But were they? Apparently and as it turned out, Mogapi was yet again walking into another deceiving snare.

To recover his P2,000 he was told that he had to produce all the agreement documentations, a copy of his national ID card and pay P250 registration fees. Because his money was P2,000 the agency was recovering, he had to pay a 10 per cent 'facilitation' fees.

In total, Mogapi was required to pay P450 upfront before the agency could embark on recovering the P2,000 he lost. According to the man who served him, it would take two to six weeks to recover the money after which he would pay a final five percent fee.
If he recovers his money, Mogapi would have paid the agency P550.

Unknown to Mogapi though, the people who allege they could help him recover his money represent a new breed of con artists operating under the guise of debt collectors.

Though the debt collection agencies have existed for years, the new crop of swindlers is operating on the pretext of debt collectors targeting desperate investors who lost their money in shylock schemes.

According to Simon Mokwena, an accountant with a leading bottle stores and a former debt collector, the agencies claiming they can recover money on behalf of those conned in shylocks or bad debtors are in fact former shylock operators who have turned to debt collectors.

"They have realised that people who lost money in shylocks are desperate to recover their money and are easy targets", he states.

When the writer visited the agency that had placed the adverts, a man at the office said they follow up cases for people who lost money in shylock schemes upon entering a 'voluntary agreement' with the distressed party.

"We work with lawyers to file cases on their behalf and wait for the legal process to take its course," he explained unconvincingly, adding that their target is usually frozen account of bad debtors.

On why they charge a registration fee and ask for a percentage against the amount to be recovered instead of recovering the money first and paying themselves from the recovered money, he said: "Ours is a service and even when you go to a lawyer or doctor you must pay consultation fees."

According to Mokwena, individuals are disguising themselves as debt collectors to con gullible people operating on the basis that there is no law that regulates the practice and conduct of debt collectors.

This has effectively provided room for anybody to set up a semausu and operate as a debt collector. "This is a business anybody can engage in," he explains, adding that in fact most are briefcase operators with no professional training.

Traditionally, debt collectors are to be viewed as ruffians who enjoy harassing, intimidating, threatening, attaching and even auctioning a debtor's properties.

This has made some people believe that because the government has failed in helping them recover their money from shylock schemes, debt collectors can use their skills to help them.

But according to Chanda Mpofu, the group operations director at PM Credit Collections, people need to realise the traditional methods of debt collection no longer work. "Things have changed and being crude does not work," she says.