10 ms·

The little black book of scams (2016)

182 points by Ibethewalrus 8y ago

geraldbauer 8y ago
FYI: I've put together an Awesome Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) Truths page. Subtitled The Art of the Steal - The Scammers' Big Lies at https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-ico-truths https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-ico-truths . Buyer beware! Cheers. Prost.
- erikb 8y ago
  Great that you put actual examples together. I like that. But I'm not sure if you can really improve the world through that. A lot of these problems are quite obvious and if people iwll still put their money into ICOs I'm not sure anything could help that. That, I feel, is the hardest part of learning more about scams and how to protect yourself. You inevitably see a lot of people who simply can't avoid it, almost going for getting scammed like a moth goes to the lamp, never learning from bad experience that you simply can't get rich quick if you aren't already rich.
  - moccachino 8y ago
    >never learning from bad experience that you simply can't get rich quick if you aren't already rich. or a scammer
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    > A lot of these problems are quite obvious Not to everyone.
- pontifier 8y ago
  Even when lightning strikes, and the coin you were supposed to get goes up x50,000 good luck trying to get them if you weren't watching the people behind it like a hawk. Case in point NEM, who kept the coins from hundreds of initial stakeholders.
- woodrowbarlow 8y ago
  good content, but: why has it has become popular to use github in this manner? to create a repo for what is essentially a blog post?
  - CocaKoala 8y ago
    I suspect it's so that people can contribute to the list through the pull request functionality that Github offers?
    - pythonaut_16 8y ago
      They could at least set it up to use Github pages then. Then you could access http://openblockchains.github.io/awesome-ico-truths http://openblockchains.github.io/awesome-ico-truths
      - geraldbauer 8y ago
        I'm the author / editor. Done. Works now with Github pages too. Cheers. Prost.
        pythonaut_16 8y ago
        Looks good! Thanks! As an added benefit, the pages version loads much faster than loading GitHub itself!
  - geraldbauer 8y ago
    I'm the author. Why not a blog post? The idea is that the page is not frozen / done and gets updated (from time-to-time) and, yes, you (in theory) can contribute too. In practice doesn't really happen.
erikb 8y ago
You sit with an old friend in bar, already quite drunk. You haven't seen this guys for years but now that you had such a nice evening you really feel like old brothers. Now he tells you about this great house he has and that he considers to move to another town. He might let you take it before he puts it on the market and to a friendship price that he could certainly not achieve on the market. Will you, at this point, remember that "Scammers dress up ‘opportunities’ with professional looking brochures and websites to mask their fraudulent operations. They often begin with a phone call or email out of the blue from a scammer offering a ‘not-to-be-missed’, ‘high return’ or ‘guaranteed’ opportunity. The scammer usually operates from overseas, and will not have an Australian Financial Services licence"? Probably not. But you might remember the story that guy on hacker news told you. You might remember, just as in that story, that you should look out carefully when a "great opportunity" arises. You might check your emotional state and find the comradry you feel to that old friend might not be based on facts since you haven't seen him for a long time. It's rather related to you two having a great night together. And you might recognize that this combination of great offer, excitement, and a person who doesn't spend time with you often are combining to red flags for a scam. But that is all because it was a specific example, a story. Not just a list of facts and attributes that generally relate to a set of scams that can be categorized as rather similar. Therefore I'd argue that such a general list of scams, without specific examples, is not worth much. People's brain simply doesn't work like that. Rather check on Youtube for actual scams. Like "tourist scams in <countryX>".
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  I think I must not be a people, because my brain does generally work that way. Perhaps it can be that some peoples' brains work one way and others another way, and perhaps there are multiple ways of working.
  - erikb 8y ago
    Can you explain how that works out? Like, do you have virtual checklists and for everything you experience over the day your head goes "check check check -> we must be in event X"? It's really hard to imagine. What I already know is emotional pattern matching. E.g. one smells a spice that one's mother used as a child and one is immediately transferred back to that time. In that way if one recognizes that high excitement is often related to advertisements or scams one might recognize when one feels that way that something might be fishy. Or what I also know is path recognition. E.g. "at first we did this, then we did this, then we did this, and therefore we arrived at X". In that way we can remember processes like riding a bike or our way home. That's also how memory palaces work.
krylon 8y ago
I remember the first time I got one of these "Nigerian scam" mails. In retrospect it is funny that what made me suspicious was not the offer to make millions in return for an upfront price of a few thousand bucks; it was the fact that the mail did not address me by name but started with the claim that I seemed to be trustworthy person. If I was trying to move a huge amount of money out of the country, would I ask some random stranger on the Internet for help? Exactly. At dinner, I told my parents about it. My mother's husband, who is a (now retired) police officer who worked in white collar crime for more than a decade, started to laugh. "Do they still use that old trick?" And so I learned that this particular type of scam dates back at least to the 1980s, when scammers used fax to contact their potential victims.
- microtherion 8y ago
  It dates back longer than the territorial boundaries of Nigeria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Prisoner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Prisoner
  - dools 8y ago
    My favourite Steve Martin film :)
  - krylon 8y ago
    My mother's husband had lots of interesting stories to tell that involved scammers and con artists; it seems people very quickly let go of all skepticism when faced with the prospect of making lots of easy money. I also remember that kind of email that used to go around back in the late 1990s that said Microsoft was sending out this mail to measure the size of the Internet or something silly like that, and that if I forwarded it to people from my address book, I would get some stupidly large amount of money for it, like 10$ per person. As far as these things go, this was fairly benign, of course, but I almost fell for it. And what made me delete the mail without forwarding it to anyone was not that "to good to be true"-aspect, but the fact that I started wondering how Microsoft would know I had forwarded this mail. And then I wondered, if everybody did forward this mail to everyone they knew, for $10 a pop, how much would that cost Microsoft? I mean, they were filthy rich back then, but still, such a thing could easily get out of hand. And even when I got the first phishing mail from "my bank" asking me for my PIN and a TAN, what made me delete it was not the fact I had deleted dozens of these from other banks where the scam was obvious because I had no affiliation with them, but the fact that I had not ever given my bank my email address. It is so easy to think that I would never fall for an obvious scam like that. But it pays to remember that the human psyche has some major bugs, and scammers know disturbingly well how to exploit those.
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
“Only pay via the website’s secure payment method—look for a web address starting with ‘https’ and a closed padlock symbol“ Someone should notify the Australian govt. that a padlock and https do not equate to security.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  "Only" implies necessary but not sufficient here.
- LeonM 8y ago
  "Never pay via a website with an address that does not start with HTTPS" would maybe be better? The padlock is the first step, and possibly the most impactful security check that a non-technical person can do. Recognising Fake webpages, XSS, CSP, malware, etc is very hard and impossible to expect from any visitor of a website.
1wd 8y ago
I didn't know there's a special "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence" (and apparently there are separate versions for other countries as well).
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
  It was the old Creative Commons v3 license. At that time, people thought, in addition to the "international version", it would be good idea to write many localized licenses for each country, so that people from each country can use the license in their native language and the legal experts can take special cares to make sure the license is completely valid under the copyright laws of a country, and the courts can understand it easily. But people eventually decided that localized CC licenses were "considered harmful" - The biggest problem is that you can never be sure whether all the localized licenses are equivalent. It makes things very complicated when you want to create a derivative work of a project, even under the same conditions, if the work released under another localized version by the author. Also, it creates lots of ambiguity in a international community project. Finally, it was difficult to maintain, they need legal experts from all the countries if the license needs changes. So localized CC licenses have been abolished when Creative Commons v4.0 was released, v4.0 only has the One True Version, the international version, it was made to be a perfectly valid license for all countries that signed Berne Convention, I believe.
triplesec 8y ago
These TV shows are very educational about this, especially the Real Hustle, which was a documentary demonstrating how to avoid scams in real life situations. I'm sure you can find them on some streaming service as repeats. The Real Hustle https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0791615/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0791615/ Hustle https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379632/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379632/
- camjohnson26 8y ago
  I enjoyed Scam City too. May still be on Netflix.
- hackermailman 8y ago
  Coworker of mine fell for this same scam in Turkey that was featured on Scam City https://turkeytravelplanner.com/details/Safety/SingleMaleScams.html https://turkeytravelplanner.com/details/Safety/SingleMaleSca...
charliebrownau 8y ago
Feminism = Biggest scam since 1970s
anonymouzz 8y ago
I recently fell victim to a nasty scam I've never heard about before. Wonder if anyone had similar experiences. Happened in Serbia on a highway. We had an RV on German plates and slept on a gas station there, next to the truckers. Morning comes and the clutch pedal is dead - no resistance when I press it (this is a manual transmission car). Obviously not driveable, and we're not car gurus to debug it. We call the insurance but it's not responding (perhaps because it's Sunday). I find a tow car nearby and ask the guy for help, to which he suggests to tow the car 10km to his garage to investigate. I agree. There they use the debug interface of the car to figure out that we need some part replaced (language is a bit of a barrier now) and quote us 700 EUR + VAT. I agree because we need to drive, and because I cannot contact insurance. After the job is done I ask them for the old part (the replaced one), and they just say it's "software", after which I realize that I was just massively overcharged/defrauded. Later when we discuss the situation with my girlfriend she tells me she's seen that tow car waiting seemingly for us for several hours, which suggests that the clutch damage was perhaps inflicted by the very people that fixed our car. I became scared of the whole situation and decided to not report it to the Serbian police and just leave the country asap (I mean if people cut cables in cars on the highway to get 700 EUR I have very low trust in the local law enforcement).
- tapland 8y ago
  > If people do crimes, why trust law enforcement? That really helps noone. Report in a nearby larger city. If they don't care they just drop it.
  - anonymouzz 8y ago
    Yeah in retrospect I should have done this, but to be fair I was just frightened by the realization of what might have just happened here, and wanted to simply leave the area. Another thing is that I have no proof to distinguish between an overpriced fix and deliberate cable cutting. Now I'm way too far from Serbia to report it.
    - watwut 8y ago
      Not knowing about Serbia specifically, but know about highly corrupt countries. Reporting to police has its own risks, through most likely they will ignore you. Ignore because don't care or ignore because they are friends with perpetrators. Also, it is highly likely they don't talk English enough. With there being no proof, you likely saved yourself pointless frustrating experience. However most likely explanation really is no cut cable, but taking advantage of foreigner with bad luck.
dt_rsp 8y ago
I was hoping it included the fiddle scam from American Gods.
- milesokeefe 8y ago
  This one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Fiddle_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Fidd...
  - dt_rsp 8y ago
    That's the one.
HourglassFR 8y ago
As my brother often says: In life, you can be greedy, you can be stupid. But you cannot afford beeing greedy and stupid at the same time.
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
As a teenager I fell for the most dumb in person scam. I was coming out of Barnes and Nobles with my gf and a guy approached me asking for money. I said no initially but then he made up this whole story about being out of gas on the way to see his kids and so on. You’d have to be an idiot to fall for that and idiot I was. So I ended up giving him $20, left feeling weird right away. I got in the car, looked at my gf and said “I bet that was a scam”. We went some place to eat then started driving home when not more than a few hundred yards away I see the dude buying booze at a nearby gas station. The only time I felt shittier in my life was when an elderly person sold me a car with a leaking gas tank, knowing that it had a leak. I can confidently say I’m scam-proof today, learned the hard way to trust nobody, especially unwelcome advances. Ah, the things I did as a stupid kid!
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Getting off the bus in NYC one day, guy comes up to me, seemingly nice guy asks if I have $5 so he can get home. Give him some money, feel scammed, couldn’t say exactly why. Talk to my Dad about it later and he asks what was it? Was he holding a book or something? Yep, right in his hand obviously when I recalled it was a cheap rough condition paperback book. My dumb brain saw that and said “surely this guy is ok, he reads!”. Dad informed me this was an old scam.
  - scrumper 8y ago
    5am in Penn Station, waiting to board the early Acela. I've been in NYC 20 years at this point and have become tolerably good at deflecting our local street scammers, for the most part. I'm printing my ticket out and a construction worker comes up to me, wiry dude with a hi-vis jacket carrying a hard hat. $5 to get home to NJ, his truck got broken into and wallet stolen, blah boo hoo. He got the $5, and it didn't take him much talking to get it. The hard hat sold me. Soon as he turned I realized I'd been scammed.
    - AYBABTME 8y ago
      I gave money to these people, and I don't think it's a scam. They're just begging by another mean. Often I just assume they don't have the chop to just ask for cash, or want to ease me into giving. I just ignore their made up story and give them change if I have some. It's charity, not "being scammed".
ada1981 8y ago
I didn’t notice these scams: Higher Education Mental Health Religious Organizations Political Elections
- FiveSquared 8y ago
  1. Yes. 2. Yes. 3. You don't have to join and don't have to pay anything. 4. Yes
- leducw 8y ago
  Can you tell me why each one is a scam? I'm curious because none of those to me seem like a scam.
  - ada1981 8y ago
    Higher Education is increasingly a bad investment, including unforgivable loans. Religious Organizations that take your money while oppressing your sexuality and agency. Mental Heatlh system that gives you drugs that often makes your problems worse or at best placebo. Political Systems that promise change and consistently simply advance the interests of the rich. Scams meaning these are things people spend money on with a particular result in mind, they end up without that result and the people promoting it are pretty aware they can’t deliver the result.
unixhero 8y ago
Good guide.

182 points by Ibethewalrus 8y ago

FYI: I've put together an Awesome Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) Truths page. Subtitled The Art of the Steal - The Scammers' Big Lies at https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-ico-truths https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-ico-truths . Buyer beware! Cheers. Prost.

erikb 8y ago
Great that you put actual examples together. I like that. But I'm not sure if you can really improve the world through that. A lot of these problems are quite obvious and if people iwll still put their money into ICOs I'm not sure anything could help that. That, I feel, is the hardest part of learning more about scams and how to protect yourself. You inevitably see a lot of people who simply can't avoid it, almost going for getting scammed like a moth goes to the lamp, never learning from bad experience that you simply can't get rich quick if you aren't already rich.
- moccachino 8y ago
  >never learning from bad experience that you simply can't get rich quick if you aren't already rich. or a scammer
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  > A lot of these problems are quite obvious Not to everyone.
pontifier 8y ago
Even when lightning strikes, and the coin you were supposed to get goes up x50,000 good luck trying to get them if you weren't watching the people behind it like a hawk. Case in point NEM, who kept the coins from hundreds of initial stakeholders.
woodrowbarlow 8y ago
good content, but: why has it has become popular to use github in this manner? to create a repo for what is essentially a blog post?
- CocaKoala 8y ago
  I suspect it's so that people can contribute to the list through the pull request functionality that Github offers?
  - pythonaut_16 8y ago
    They could at least set it up to use Github pages then. Then you could access http://openblockchains.github.io/awesome-ico-truths http://openblockchains.github.io/awesome-ico-truths
    - geraldbauer 8y ago
      I'm the author / editor. Done. Works now with Github pages too. Cheers. Prost.
      - pythonaut_16 8y ago
        Looks good! Thanks! As an added benefit, the pages version loads much faster than loading GitHub itself!
- geraldbauer 8y ago
  I'm the author. Why not a blog post? The idea is that the page is not frozen / done and gets updated (from time-to-time) and, yes, you (in theory) can contribute too. In practice doesn't really happen.

erikb 8y ago

You sit with an old friend in bar, already quite drunk. You haven't seen this guys for years but now that you had such a nice evening you really feel like old brothers. Now he tells you about this great house he has and that he considers to move to another town. He might let you take it before he puts it on the market and to a friendship price that he could certainly not achieve on the market. Will you, at this point, remember that "Scammers dress up ‘opportunities’ with professional looking brochures and websites to mask their fraudulent operations. They often begin with a phone call or email out of the blue from a scammer offering a ‘not-to-be-missed’, ‘high return’ or ‘guaranteed’ opportunity. The scammer usually operates from overseas, and will not have an Australian Financial Services licence"? Probably not. But you might remember the story that guy on hacker news told you. You might remember, just as in that story, that you should look out carefully when a "great opportunity" arises. You might check your emotional state and find the comradry you feel to that old friend might not be based on facts since you haven't seen him for a long time. It's rather related to you two having a great night together. And you might recognize that this combination of great offer, excitement, and a person who doesn't spend time with you often are combining to red flags for a scam. But that is all because it was a specific example, a story. Not just a list of facts and attributes that generally relate to a set of scams that can be categorized as rather similar. Therefore I'd argue that such a general list of scams, without specific examples, is not worth much. People's brain simply doesn't work like that. Rather check on Youtube for actual scams. Like "tourist scams in <countryX>".

bryanrasmussen 8y ago
I think I must not be a people, because my brain does generally work that way. Perhaps it can be that some peoples' brains work one way and others another way, and perhaps there are multiple ways of working.
- erikb 8y ago
  Can you explain how that works out? Like, do you have virtual checklists and for everything you experience over the day your head goes "check check check -> we must be in event X"? It's really hard to imagine. What I already know is emotional pattern matching. E.g. one smells a spice that one's mother used as a child and one is immediately transferred back to that time. In that way if one recognizes that high excitement is often related to advertisements or scams one might recognize when one feels that way that something might be fishy. Or what I also know is path recognition. E.g. "at first we did this, then we did this, then we did this, and therefore we arrived at X". In that way we can remember processes like riding a bike or our way home. That's also how memory palaces work.

krylon 8y ago

I remember the first time I got one of these "Nigerian scam" mails. In retrospect it is funny that what made me suspicious was not the offer to make millions in return for an upfront price of a few thousand bucks; it was the fact that the mail did not address me by name but started with the claim that I seemed to be trustworthy person. If I was trying to move a huge amount of money out of the country, would I ask some random stranger on the Internet for help? Exactly. At dinner, I told my parents about it. My mother's husband, who is a (now retired) police officer who worked in white collar crime for more than a decade, started to laugh. "Do they still use that old trick?" And so I learned that this particular type of scam dates back at least to the 1980s, when scammers used fax to contact their potential victims.

microtherion 8y ago
It dates back longer than the territorial boundaries of Nigeria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Prisoner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Prisoner
- dools 8y ago
  My favourite Steve Martin film :)
- krylon 8y ago
  My mother's husband had lots of interesting stories to tell that involved scammers and con artists; it seems people very quickly let go of all skepticism when faced with the prospect of making lots of easy money. I also remember that kind of email that used to go around back in the late 1990s that said Microsoft was sending out this mail to measure the size of the Internet or something silly like that, and that if I forwarded it to people from my address book, I would get some stupidly large amount of money for it, like 10$ per person. As far as these things go, this was fairly benign, of course, but I almost fell for it. And what made me delete the mail without forwarding it to anyone was not that "to good to be true"-aspect, but the fact that I started wondering how Microsoft would know I had forwarded this mail. And then I wondered, if everybody did forward this mail to everyone they knew, for $10 a pop, how much would that cost Microsoft? I mean, they were filthy rich back then, but still, such a thing could easily get out of hand. And even when I got the first phishing mail from "my bank" asking me for my PIN and a TAN, what made me delete it was not the fact I had deleted dozens of these from other banks where the scam was obvious because I had no affiliation with them, but the fact that I had not ever given my bank my email address. It is so easy to think that I would never fall for an obvious scam like that. But it pays to remember that the human psyche has some major bugs, and scammers know disturbingly well how to exploit those.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago

“Only pay via the website’s secure payment method—look for a web address starting with ‘https’ and a closed padlock symbol“ Someone should notify the Australian govt. that a padlock and https do not equate to security.

quickthrower2 8y ago
"Only" implies necessary but not sufficient here.
LeonM 8y ago
"Never pay via a website with an address that does not start with HTTPS" would maybe be better? The padlock is the first step, and possibly the most impactful security check that a non-technical person can do. Recognising Fake webpages, XSS, CSP, malware, etc is very hard and impossible to expect from any visitor of a website.

1wd 8y ago

I didn't know there's a special "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence" (and apparently there are separate versions for other countries as well).

bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
It was the old Creative Commons v3 license. At that time, people thought, in addition to the "international version", it would be good idea to write many localized licenses for each country, so that people from each country can use the license in their native language and the legal experts can take special cares to make sure the license is completely valid under the copyright laws of a country, and the courts can understand it easily. But people eventually decided that localized CC licenses were "considered harmful" - The biggest problem is that you can never be sure whether all the localized licenses are equivalent. It makes things very complicated when you want to create a derivative work of a project, even under the same conditions, if the work released under another localized version by the author. Also, it creates lots of ambiguity in a international community project. Finally, it was difficult to maintain, they need legal experts from all the countries if the license needs changes. So localized CC licenses have been abolished when Creative Commons v4.0 was released, v4.0 only has the One True Version, the international version, it was made to be a perfectly valid license for all countries that signed Berne Convention, I believe.

triplesec 8y ago

These TV shows are very educational about this, especially the Real Hustle, which was a documentary demonstrating how to avoid scams in real life situations. I'm sure you can find them on some streaming service as repeats. The Real Hustle https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0791615/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0791615/ Hustle https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379632/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379632/

camjohnson26 8y ago
I enjoyed Scam City too. May still be on Netflix.
hackermailman 8y ago
Coworker of mine fell for this same scam in Turkey that was featured on Scam City https://turkeytravelplanner.com/details/Safety/SingleMaleScams.html https://turkeytravelplanner.com/details/Safety/SingleMaleSca...

charliebrownau 8y ago

Feminism = Biggest scam since 1970s

anonymouzz 8y ago

I recently fell victim to a nasty scam I've never heard about before. Wonder if anyone had similar experiences. Happened in Serbia on a highway. We had an RV on German plates and slept on a gas station there, next to the truckers. Morning comes and the clutch pedal is dead - no resistance when I press it (this is a manual transmission car). Obviously not driveable, and we're not car gurus to debug it. We call the insurance but it's not responding (perhaps because it's Sunday). I find a tow car nearby and ask the guy for help, to which he suggests to tow the car 10km to his garage to investigate. I agree. There they use the debug interface of the car to figure out that we need some part replaced (language is a bit of a barrier now) and quote us 700 EUR + VAT. I agree because we need to drive, and because I cannot contact insurance. After the job is done I ask them for the old part (the replaced one), and they just say it's "software", after which I realize that I was just massively overcharged/defrauded. Later when we discuss the situation with my girlfriend she tells me she's seen that tow car waiting seemingly for us for several hours, which suggests that the clutch damage was perhaps inflicted by the very people that fixed our car. I became scared of the whole situation and decided to not report it to the Serbian police and just leave the country asap (I mean if people cut cables in cars on the highway to get 700 EUR I have very low trust in the local law enforcement).

tapland 8y ago
> If people do crimes, why trust law enforcement? That really helps noone. Report in a nearby larger city. If they don't care they just drop it.
- anonymouzz 8y ago
  Yeah in retrospect I should have done this, but to be fair I was just frightened by the realization of what might have just happened here, and wanted to simply leave the area. Another thing is that I have no proof to distinguish between an overpriced fix and deliberate cable cutting. Now I'm way too far from Serbia to report it.
  - watwut 8y ago
    Not knowing about Serbia specifically, but know about highly corrupt countries. Reporting to police has its own risks, through most likely they will ignore you. Ignore because don't care or ignore because they are friends with perpetrators. Also, it is highly likely they don't talk English enough. With there being no proof, you likely saved yourself pointless frustrating experience. However most likely explanation really is no cut cable, but taking advantage of foreigner with bad luck.

dt_rsp 8y ago

I was hoping it included the fiddle scam from American Gods.

milesokeefe 8y ago
This one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Fiddle_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Fidd...
- dt_rsp 8y ago
  That's the one.

HourglassFR 8y ago

As my brother often says: In life, you can be greedy, you can be stupid. But you cannot afford beeing greedy and stupid at the same time.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago

As a teenager I fell for the most dumb in person scam. I was coming out of Barnes and Nobles with my gf and a guy approached me asking for money. I said no initially but then he made up this whole story about being out of gas on the way to see his kids and so on. You’d have to be an idiot to fall for that and idiot I was. So I ended up giving him $20, left feeling weird right away. I got in the car, looked at my gf and said “I bet that was a scam”. We went some place to eat then started driving home when not more than a few hundred yards away I see the dude buying booze at a nearby gas station. The only time I felt shittier in my life was when an elderly person sold me a car with a leaking gas tank, knowing that it had a leak. I can confidently say I’m scam-proof today, learned the hard way to trust nobody, especially unwelcome advances. Ah, the things I did as a stupid kid!

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
Getting off the bus in NYC one day, guy comes up to me, seemingly nice guy asks if I have $5 so he can get home. Give him some money, feel scammed, couldn’t say exactly why. Talk to my Dad about it later and he asks what was it? Was he holding a book or something? Yep, right in his hand obviously when I recalled it was a cheap rough condition paperback book. My dumb brain saw that and said “surely this guy is ok, he reads!”. Dad informed me this was an old scam.
- scrumper 8y ago
  5am in Penn Station, waiting to board the early Acela. I've been in NYC 20 years at this point and have become tolerably good at deflecting our local street scammers, for the most part. I'm printing my ticket out and a construction worker comes up to me, wiry dude with a hi-vis jacket carrying a hard hat. $5 to get home to NJ, his truck got broken into and wallet stolen, blah boo hoo. He got the $5, and it didn't take him much talking to get it. The hard hat sold me. Soon as he turned I realized I'd been scammed.
  - AYBABTME 8y ago
    I gave money to these people, and I don't think it's a scam. They're just begging by another mean. Often I just assume they don't have the chop to just ask for cash, or want to ease me into giving. I just ignore their made up story and give them change if I have some. It's charity, not "being scammed".

ada1981 8y ago

I didn’t notice these scams: Higher Education Mental Health Religious Organizations Political Elections

FiveSquared 8y ago
1. Yes. 2. Yes. 3. You don't have to join and don't have to pay anything. 4. Yes
leducw 8y ago
Can you tell me why each one is a scam? I'm curious because none of those to me seem like a scam.
- ada1981 8y ago
  Higher Education is increasingly a bad investment, including unforgivable loans. Religious Organizations that take your money while oppressing your sexuality and agency. Mental Heatlh system that gives you drugs that often makes your problems worse or at best placebo. Political Systems that promise change and consistently simply advance the interests of the rich. Scams meaning these are things people spend money on with a particular result in mind, they end up without that result and the people promoting it are pretty aware they can’t deliver the result.

unixhero 8y ago

Good guide.