Years ago, I bought headphones that were ¼ of the price of the big name Bose and Sony’s and provided at least ¾ the experience. When I wore them so much they eventually broke years later, I purchased some more from their website. Turns out they have been taking orders and haven’t been delivering products. Their Facebook page still posts ads and the comments are people talking about how it was a scam. That’s $170 dollars I won’t get back. It’s weird because I really liked their product and had no reason to think they would suddenly stop delivering. Very strange.
Brand is Cowin, by the way.
You can contest that sort of thing with your bank if you are quick about it. Probably too late now, but I had something similar happen and that’s how I resolved it. In my case, the rumor was the owner of the website had died
Yeah I wasn’t fast enough and I also tried to contact their support and such. Oh well
I believe this company used to sell MP3 players about 20 years ago. I had several and they were all actually pretty decent products at the time. if its the same company I am rather sad that it may have devolved into some sort of scam.
I had a scam that netted me in no change in money whatsoever.
These scammers offer you this “you’ll rate these stuff on sites and we’ll give you money”, after completing a first batch and they give you some money, they’ll try to get the victim to believe they are legit. After believing that you’re trusting them enough, they pull the ponzi card “for next missions pay us 30-1000$ amount; you’ll recieve double after doing them”.
I got 30$ from them in total so I sent 30$ knowing it was a scam to see what they would do; of course they blocked me. I was expecting them to try to get more money out of me, appearently they’re satisfied with getting their bait back.
Curious what would have happened if you just stopped at $30 up (also remember, $ before the number; ¢ after)
Was the $30 paid into your account, or in the form of a check or something?
Imagine if it was check, and it bounced a week later and OP never realized, living his whole life thinking he didn’t get scammed.
Online bartending school. I cancelled after 5 minutes of reflection.
My mother-in-law straight up bought the Nigerian Prince scam hook, line and sinker.
My MILs partner bought gift cards for Rod Stewart who messaged him on FB.
I’m still waiting for my $1000 from Bill Gates for passing on his e-mail :(
To my eternal shame, that really happened. I was young, gullible and stupid…
I guess there are worse ways to learn not to be so trusting.Had a lapse of judgement once and sent one of those 2FA passcodes sent to me via SMS to a shady guy on Craigslist. This was back when 2FA was still in the process of becoming ubiquitous, I do not believe I had seen one before that point.
I believe the only thing it allowed them to do was register a Google Talk number in my account’s name. I immediately dissociated my account from the number after this interaction (strangely, you could not actually cancel the number, only disown it, so I guess the scammer still got what they wanted anyway) and changed my account password for good measure.
I’ve also bought many bootleg collectors items off of Ebay. Though, each time I’ve done so was fully knowing the listings were lying, and still wanting the bootleg garbage anyway.
Moving into a new neighborhood with my girlfriend. We each lived in different parts of town and worked different schedules, so each arranged for separate moves. I had just finished unloading my stuff. Friendly neighbor walked over to say hello. We started chatting. Nice guy.
At some point, he mentioned something about having to head home for a pizza party. Checked his wallet and he was short. We all know where this is heading so I’ll skip to the end. It only cost me $40. Never saw him again.
Lesson learned.
Lol, I’d rather be a nice person and short $40 than a jerk to every new friendly person I met.
I moved into a new place, there was a tenant in private suite downstairs.
We hung out here and there and I fronted him for a couple restaurant meals over a few weeks.
When I started asking for him to pay me back he laughed and said no, you shouldn’t give money to strangers.
I let the landlord know, he didn’t care, we stopped talking and I eventually moved out.
When I was younger I read somewhere “If you give someone $20 and never see them again, it was probably worth it.” Accounting for inflation I think that perfectly fits your situation.
Nice idea, scammers! Weeding out what works and doesn’t with this feedback! But it won’t work on meeeeeee
I received a friendship request on Facebook from a friend, picture matched, 30 common friends, so I accepted. Next day he wrote me, that he was sick of strep, but now is fine, I said sorry, then he asked “have you applied for the NEH government fund? they help people that do social labor”. As I do some kind of social labor I asked what was that, he asked me to contact the NEH official, this second guy asked my address to check if I was a potential receiver, I gave my address, he said “yes, you can apply” please send me this filled form. I got suspicious, went back and asked my friend “have you contacted Rose again? the consultant we met at Berlin?”. He answered, “no, no further contact with her”. We have never been together in Berlin or known any Rose. So, I reported the fake account to facebook, contacted my friend and let him know about the fake so he can also report it, and adviced him to notify the other 30 common friends on the list.
I once changed power company based on a phone seller (stupid, I know).
They were promising all kinds of savings but in the end they ended up costing MORE than my previous one AND make it almost impossible to get out of the fraudulent deal.
I eventually managed to get out of it though, and since they pissed off a shitload of other people too, that company doesn’t do business in my country at all anymore. And of course I’ve hung up on every telemarketer since then.
Not really fallen for, but at some point you don’t really have a choice. So in Bali near the waterfalls you sometimes have these people who claim to work for some official company asking for the entrance fee, but of course they don’t. But are you gonna just say no and keep on driving to save like 2,50 bucks when 2 burly guys are telling you to stop?
Seems like happens in almost everywhere in 2nd & 3rd world countries. :(
Capitalism
Bottom text
A bank tried to sell me a pension fund contract. Luckily, I know my math and found out that it was so bad that I’d call it a scam.
I sold cutco knives for a month.
If you’re looking for a job, stay the fuck away from anything dealing with “CutCo” or “Vector Marketing.”
Fun fact: MLMs cannot be made illegal because they’re a quintessential expression of pure capitalism.
What about making your country not pure capitalism
Literally communism.
So what is actually the deal with CutCo? I know they’re a scam, everyone knows they’re a scam, but this one particular woman I know to be in general not a dummy, says her son spent the summer selling their knives once and made good money.
Was he just lying to her? How does the scam work?
Okay, so, it’s not technically a scam. It’s an MLM. The salesman has to buy the stuff they want to sell up-front, and then they have to try and sell it to people. If no one wants to buy, then they’re stuck with a whole bunch of whatever–knives in the case of CutCo/Vector–and out the money that they spent. If they happen to be an exceptionally good salesperson, then they can sell everything they purchased, and use their profit to buy more, and sell more, etc.
The issue is that the knives aren’t particularly great. They’re solidly ‘okay’, and that’s about it. But despite being just kind of okay, the prices are on the higher end. That is, you can get Global or Shun for a similar price, and Global and Shun are both quite good. So if you’re a serious cook, your going to spend the same and get better knives. If you’re a typical home cook, you’re not going to see the value in spending that much on kitchen knives.
But! The real money is in convincing some poor sucker to buy his stock to sell from you. You buy from your supplier, and then you sell at a markup to some other poor schmuck that then has to sell knives at either a higher cost or lower profit margin to someone else. It’s a game of hot potato, and the person holding it at the end gets burned.
MLMs can be actually viable jobs for a very select few of people. Not entirely unlike how you can theoretically make money at a casino. There need to be winners to the game once in a while, or else no one would play. The game is just rigged wildly out of your favor.
The general structure of an MLM as I understand it is sort of a cross between a wholesale job and playing a mobile gacha game. Unlike a normal business where you purchase stock to match your demand, and only stock items that actually sell, an MLM contractually obligates you to buy a certain volume of stock, and each shipment is essentially a lootbox full of who knows what. It then becomes your responsibility to get rid of the stock any way you possibly can.
When you buy all that stock, you are not buying it from a factory or a warehouse. You are buying it from another person in the same position as you, one layer up. They are also playing the lootbox gacha and trying to get rid of all the crap. Except, hmm, now they have at least one person beneath them who is contractually forced to buy from them, and can’t select which stock they’re buying. Gee, I wonder what you’re gonna be getting…
Whenever you actually do manage to sell something off, a cut of that kicks back to the person who sold you that stock. And a piece of that kickback goes to the person who sold them that stock, and so on, up and up.
The real money in MLMs is having so many people beneath you that the kickbacks start adding up into significant income. This is theoretically achievable. But it requires a very specific kind of personality matrix who is not squeamish about being a little cut-throat to get ahead, and generally requires a significant investment where you are going deep into the red just for the opportunity. And even if you do make it there, you have to accept the knowledge that your profitability can only exist necessarily because of the existence of many people beneath you all spinning those slots and losing the rigged game to the house (who by this point is you).
Like all these multi-level-marketing scams, the scam part is that you have to buy your stock from the company/from your “upline”, and then whether or not you make money depends on you reselling your stock.
John Oliver did an excellent video on the overall topic. Definitely worth the watch.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Or any other kind of pyramid scheme, really
The knives are decent; if the only way to get a new one wasn’t through an MLM I might actually buy them.
It’s not an MLM or pyramid scheme; it is regular sales employment. You’re not getting other people to sell them for you nor are you encouraged to find others looking to join the sales team. It just sucks dick because the pay is shit (and they go through hoops to pay you less or nothing; which is where the scam part comes in), they treat you like shit, and you have to basically sell them door-to-door.
It’s stupid because the knives are great products; I still have my sample set because they actually rock. They just only sell them like Tupperware clubs and only market them via word of mouth. They’d be making bank if they just sold them to retailers instead of fucking with young people looking for their first job.
I’ve never fallen for bad scams luckily but I fall for little ones sometimes. Like once I was entering the subway in a country where I didn’t speak the language and this guy coming the other way said the trains were cancelled, so I asked how do I get to X place, and he’s like “Oh, my friend has a taxi company, come with me and I’ll sort you out”. I was just about to follow him when I came back to my senses. Obviously there was nothing wrong with the trains and he was trying to fleece a tourist… or kidnap a woman, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
