One I fell for: last minute, I needed to take a cat on a flight. I was googling what I needed to do for the airline and ended up with a scam number. The issue was I didn’t even have to click through to the site, I’d like to think I’d have caught on. But the number was bolded in the suggested results without having to click through toanywhere. I was in a panic getting ready for the flight, so I wasn’t on my game.
Immediately after I gave the person my credit card info over the phone, like literally the minute I hung up, I realized that it was so obviously a scam. Called my credit card company and had them block the charge and change the card number. Definitely not the pain in the ass I needed right before a trip, but it made me more cautious for the future and luckily I didn’t lose any money.
My sister fell for one I couldn’t believe. A kid was washing windows on the side of the road, she said she didn’t have any cash and he said, “That’s okay I have cash app, I’ll type in my name.” She handed her phone over and he cash apped himself $2000. No recourse since cash app isn’t a real bank transfer. Expensive lesson to learn.
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.
Holy shit, how fucking dumb can you be? Hes lucky he didnt get the shit sued out him
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 $200 gift card and give me the info.”
If you’re stressed and have a shitty boss with no boundaries, I could see it working.
I imagine the guy being 3000IQ and wanted to leave, so he pretended to be scammed to be fired without quitting and divided the 5000$ with his pal
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?
My cousin has been blackmailed for dick pics twice in his fucken life. Makes me wheeze just thinking about it lmao
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.
I’d probably laugh at someone who tried to blackmail me with pictures of my dick. I’m a guy, it can’t ruin my life lmao
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”
“You don’t come here for the hunting, do you?”
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.
I got scammed in Thailand. A guy on the street let me hold his slow loris. My friend took a couple of photos while it was trying to climb onto my hat, and only then did the guy tell me that photos were 200 baht each. Best scam ever.
Do games count? I got scammed on runescape out of a 50mil item which was a lot at the time (this was sometime around 2003-2005). 50-100 hours of time for me to get it at an estimate. It was a stupid mistake that I thought I was smart enough to avoid, with what I now recognise as classic signs of a scam (slightly too good to be true, moving goal posts, slightly odd but not entirely unreasonable requests). But I can tell you I’m glad I got scammed young on a game, because it was a good lesson with very low actual harm (only time lost realistically) and made me WAY more wary of things.
I was at a family gathering and my grandfather was in the middle of something. He asked for my help and turns out “Apple support” on the phone was trying to get him to pay some overdue bills with giftcards.
I joked around a bit with the guy and he started to threaten me, ha.
My mom (boomer) has been scammed twice, and it’s not been a simple issue of naivety or even stupidity…it’s been that, and a bit of greed, thinking more about what she’d get out of the deal, than how much sense the whole thing made, in each case. The underlying thing that attracted the scammers in each case, were her Facebook posts about going on multiple vacations and cruises.
The first one was the scam about an inheritance in probate, in Nigeria. She just had to send the money for the courts to get past probate, and then she’d be able to claim the inheritance left by her mysterious relative. Now, the maternal side of my family is Polish and Romanian, and the paternal side is British and German. I just don’t know who she may have thought bounced over to Nigeria and keeled over.
The second scam was the Exxon executive, who woke up in a hospital bed after a car accident, missing his wallet. The hospital was holding him captive in his hospital room until he could pay his bill, which somehow she could help with, by sending Amazon gift cards. The greed part comes in with him apparently having his phone, and being able to send her pics of his cars, properties, and bank statements. The stupid part comes in from about a thousand different directions and 4 dimensions…I mean, she even met his “daughter” in a video call, and adoption was discussed (the mother was apparently long dead). My mom spent a full career as a RN - in hospitals (in the US) - where they don’t incarcerate people until the bills are paid. Additionally, one would think that since any Tom, Dick, or Harry, missing their wallet, but with their phone, would be able to get ahold of someone - anyone, who might be able to contact a financial institution or work colleague, to secure proof of funds availability, replacement credit cards, or access to their finances. An executive with Exxon should definitely be able to show at least enough bling to pop themselves out of “hospital jail,” one would think. Finally, Amazon gift cards?
With my sister going through their correspondence, we found the name he gave my mom to be one letter off the correct spelling of the Exxon executive in the photo of himself that he sent her. The location of his grand home, on Google Earth anyway, appears to be the pool maintenance shed at a motel in TX.
Me: “Mom! It’s a scam.”
Mom: “No! I love him, and he loves me! I’m flying out to meet him, and help him out of the hospital. His daughter is picking me up from the airport.”
Me: “Wait. You said you were thinking about adopting his daughter when you got married - to this guy you’ve never met in person. The daughter is an adult?!”
Mom: “No. She’s 16 and has her driver’s license.”
Me: “So wait…she lives in his house with no adult supervision, since her father is hospital-bound. She has access to the car, but somehow can’t help with transportation, banking access, or the replacement credit card/replacement ID situation?”
Mom: “You’re so negative. You just don’t want to understand.”
Me: 🙄😒🫤
Sister wanted to get a job doing art and ended up getting an offer to work as an illustrator for a publishing company. One of her parents was all in in this. The other parent asked me to look out over to see if it was real or not. Turns out it was a scam I found out from 5 minutes of web searching. I had to be the one to break the news and the parent who was all in on the idea didn’t seem fazed that this was likely a scam since “there was a chance it was real”.
Nothing was signed, but I had to take the hit of standing in the way of the sister’s success.
That’s rough, just trying to help (because you were asked!) and you get accused of being a hater and killing her dreams.
At the start of the pan, someone advertised nude media to make extra cash during the initial lockdown. I sent the $20 or whatever it was. Turned out they wanted to draw more cash and that was only the opener. Felt like a scam and I blocked them. Felt I had been conned. Never knew if that’s true for sure.
Otherwise, only shitty products and services that came from corporations.
Plenty of nudes on the internet man.
But that human connection i guess is what you were really after
No, it was more like “I can benefit while helping someone in a time of need, so why not.” I wouldn’t have purchased had we not been in an unprecedented situation. That’s part of why it felt so shitty when I thought I saw signs of a potential scam.
So you paid for nudes, they sent you one, then tried to get you to buy more?
They sent a set of pics and vids.
Idk this doesn’t feel like a scam. You paid for something, they sent it, they said “you want more? More money please.” Did you want more for free? I don’t get it.
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.
