Knew somebody who lost 70k buying a car on ebay.
Wow! We have 5 vehicles in our household, a camper, and we used to have 2 motorcycles. 1 vehicle was inherited after a death on the family, 1 vehicle was found in a sales-paper/magazine called “The Trading Post.” The camper was bought new from a dealership via eBay, and we saved $13.5k buying the 5th wheel version of the same camper that we walked through locally in VA, in its tag-along version - I just had to drive to IA to get it. The 3 other vehicles and 2 motorcycles were bought through eBay, and they’ve all been good experiences.
Maybe elaborate?
A believed a guy who said he just got out of jail and needed $10 for a bus ride home. I was 17. Found an ATM, gave him the cash, saw him walking around the mall with his girlfriend 20 minutes later.
That stimulus package helped him very quickly!
My best friend used to work at a local fast food chain, and there was one week when we were both on vacation with our other friends. He was a Lead and the manager was also away during this timeframe.
We find out that some employee ended up falling for a phone scam, someone called the restaurant stating that they were the manager and needed money to cover some business costs. So this scammer tells the employee to buy gift cards and read out the numbers on the phone and such.
This dumbass ACTUALLY does this, while using the restaurant funds. He goes to Walmart with cash from the drawers, buys the gift cards worth like 5000 bucks, and gives them all to the scammer on the phone.
It wasn’t until after the full transaction completed that the dumbass employee decided to call my friend asking if what he did was okay, and my friend was like “FUCK NO, WHY THE FUCK DID YOU DO THAT, ARE YOU INSANE?”
And yeah, pretty sure that dude was fired and they just had to deal with being short 5000 dollars.
I feel like part of falling for this is being in a job where you don’t question management doing stupid shit that shouldn’t be your job. I works hope that $5000 would ping your bullshit meter, but I could easily see falling for a more believable story. Maybe not at a fast food place but like, a big office or some place where there are bullshit parties. Especially with a spoofed email or text rather than a voice call. “It’s [some fake appreciation day] and I need to bring in cake/gifts, I don’t have the business card on me, buy this $200 gift card and give me the info.”
If you’re stressed and have a shitty boss with no boundaries, I could see it working.
Holy shit, how fucking dumb can you be? Hes lucky he didnt get the shit sued out him
I imagine the guy being 3000IQ and wanted to leave, so he pretended to be scammed to be fired without quitting and divided the 5000$ with his pal
My cousin has been blackmailed for dick pics twice in his fucken life. Makes me wheeze just thinking about it lmao
“You don’t come here for the hunting, do you?”
Wait,blackmailed for dick pics as in “send me dick pics or else”, or blackmailed for sending dick pics, “yo, you just send nudes to a minor, give me cash or I’ll tell the cops”.
Idk if I said that right. He sent a dick pic and the “chick” was like “Aye sicc now give me money or your family sees this” TWICE.
Idk if they asked first or how that went, but he fell for it twice.
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Yeah but teenagers have no brain for this.
Then young men are always paranoid about dicks.
Eventually we all grow out of fucks to give though
If he was a minor, the uno reverse there is “congrats you have CSAM on your phone, enjoy explaining that to the police”
Not a scam but scumbag behaviour.:
My grandmother was offered a expensive credit line by the bank very insistently on the phone after they solved other of her problems. She obviously fell for it and had to pay a shit ton of interests.
They are verbose and pushy towards elderly people because they know they are prone to accept thing they do not need/want.
Honestly the US credit system is one big scam
Tried buying lifetime plan of some web (hoster|HTML-less dr(ag|dop) site builder) . Then saw reddit comments about how you apparently get (spam emails after registering with them|your domain hijacked|.*) . Don’t know if can even still get refunded , been years
Bro, people normally don’t comment in the form of a regular expression.
What’s a drdop anyhow?
Had a contractor working on my basement who fell for a pig butchering scam. Took him for 50k
…is a pig butchering scam something that didn’t involve actual pig butchering? Or…
It’s a sophisticated scam where they take you for all you have.
- hire models to talk to guys on tinder
- convince them to download a fake crypto app you created
- have them invest a small amount and let them take out more than they put in to gain trust
- convinced them to invest it all
- don’t let them take it out when they “win”, tell them they need to pay escrow fees
- don’t let them take it, say there’s problems with the escrow service, and make them pay more to fix it
- don’t let them take it out, say the minimum transfer went up, make them invest more to take it out
- when they call out it’s a scam, have the actress say she’s being held captive until she scams enough money to buy back her life/family/whatever and convince the victim to pay it
- when they realize that’s still the scam, tell them you’re sorry and they can get in on it to make their money back. Have them wire you money for lessons and access. Don’t deliver
Damn. And for $50K, brutal.
Dad fell for a Microsoft key scam. They were calling him about invalid registration or something. Kept asking for £500.
Stopped calling after my infuriated sister, who was living with our parents at the time, basically bullied the shit out of them on the phone.
My older neighbor got a call from a guy who called her “mom” and said he’d been in a car accident, and there was a problem with his insurance, so he was in real trouble if he couldn’t pay cash for the damage, the other guy was gonna call the cops, and he needed $2,000 to give to the other guy for the damage.
She said “Tim?” and the guy said "yeah mom its Tim and kept repeating he was gonna go to jail for not having insurance cause it lapsed just this week and he needed to run to the store and he was in an accident.
She withdrew 2k from the bank and some guy came and said he was Tim’s friend and he needed to go right then the cops were gonna arrest Tim.
Apparently, he snatched the money out of her hand and ran to his car and left. She felt very foolish.
Wow, what an absolute scumbag.
For some reason this pyramid scheme (World Games Inc) was highly popular where I grew up. “Everyone” was in on it, but my family somehow wasn’t. But you couldn’t even strike up a casual conversation with anyone without it ending up as a sales pitch. It was fucking tiresome. Luckily the thing folded eons ago.
Was travelling with some friends in Istanbul. They were pretty inexperienced abroad, so I figured out public transit there, told them what tickets to buy, and we all walked to the ticket machine. There was a big line/crowd, and a guy up front was taking cash and giving people tickets, which he got by scanning a card at the machine. I went first hoping to show my friends what to do - bought my ticket for like €5 or so and ignored the scammer. They all gave the scammer guy like €20 for him to scan his pass and buy them a €5 ticket. Their reasons were “he seemed official” and “I knew it was a scam, but I figured it was just easier to go along with it”.
I did fall for a taxi scam in Peru though and ended up staying at a hotel run by some mafia types. They were cool, though, so it turned out OK - just cost me a little extra money for an interesting story.
I used to work with a bloke who got scammed in the car park for a house sound system.
He’s a smart bloke runs a company of his own now too but he was at the shop on the weekend buying whatever.
Two guys approached him in a truck and said our boss ordered one sound system but got two and we got told to get rid of it but have to get to the job for install in 15 minutes. If you’re interested its yours for 500 dollars or whatever.
My mate jumped at it bought it all and went on his way.
Turns out the speakers were just speaker boxes no actual stuff inside no cables doe the stereo etc.
As he told us the story we couldn’t believe he fell for it, but there’s a sucker every minute as they say.
I periodically give things away to people who just immediately sell them. I never trust them again, and it’s rarely items I directly need, I just like to have them around to loan to people.
You either give things away or loan them not both. Sucks to hear someone just sold the stuff you were trying to help them with though.
It seems like this is endemic on freecycle type groups, such a bummer.
I needed a place to live and applied for a place. Guy called me up and wanted to sign a lease without seeing the place and send me a virus link to click. I kept asking to meet him there and he kept telling me to click the virus link.
I didn’t, but unfortunately I had sent him the info you would apply for a lease for. No financial info fortunately. Had to lock my credit report. I get 10,000 scam calls a day.
I was homeless at the time and I took this really hard.
This is what I hate, so many scams prey on people who are desperate or otherwise already in hard times. Scamming someone who doesn’t have a roof over their head, or is elderly and lives off a small social security income, or needs a job to afford food… that shit is the lowest of lows.
I guess if you scam rich people you’re more likely to be caught.
I once locked myself out of my apartment. It was not locked-locked, just the key was inside. In full panic mode (because my dog was inside and it was late at night) I googled for a locksmith. You can already see the mistakes I made here. I called them, a guy came over with a lot of tools. He showed me the upcoming cost, I had to agree with it on the spot, but it was what he said on the phone. Then he started his work and, unable to open the bolt with sandpaper (why sandpaper I don’t know), began loudly rattling on the door to loosen it somehow. My neighbors were probably really annoyed by this and my dog scared. This went on for 15-20 minutes and it finally worked (don’t remember if it was only from the rattling or something else). It turns out this was unnecessary, more on that later.
We sat down to do the payment and this is the scam part: it suddenly cost 4-5 times the amount he told me on the phone! I was confused but made my next mistake: I paid it because I suddenly had the feeling this is a criminal organization and I would be in trouble with them.
Next day I checked valid prices and it was way overpaid. I tried to ask my bank to get my money back but it was a kind of payment that wouldn’t allow this. I even called the guy back and asked for my money, he laughed at me. I went to the local consumer protection agency, they could not help me. The „invoice“ he gave me was not valid, it had no real company, no sales tax ID. Nothing I could do here. He did actually help me get inside my apartment but it was way too expensive and the guy was not even good at what he was doing.
Multiple mistakes:
- I panicked
- I did not check if I might be able to do it on my own
- I googled
- I did not check if the invoice is valid (I’m no lawyer but it looked sketchy)
Later I learned how to easily break into my apartment in a similar situation using a simple wire. I don’t know why this asshole made it so complicated and loud.
I have since been very paranoid about forgetting my keys.
Pro tip: When you move into a new place, take some time to check for locksmiths and other services in your local area that are legit and save those in your phone book. If something happens you know where to go and don’t have to ask Google.
