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I got scammed once, in the early days of the crypto craze. I was selling a video card on Reddit, and the person sent me a forged btc escrow email. I was naive e
by overcast 7y ago
I got scammed once, in the early days of the crypto craze. I was selling a video card on Reddit, and the person sent me a forged btc escrow email. I was naive enough not to pay attention while in a rush, and promptly shipped the card. Days later, he messages me throwing it in my face how stupid I was, even posted images of the card in his computer.
Probably thinking I was too stupid to follow up, I began the manhunt. He used a lot of very similar aliases on Reddit, and the identical email around the internet tied to publicly displayed IP addresses while scamming others. Tracerouting those IPs all zeroed in on the same exact town. He also foolishly used a real mailing address(his friends). The images he posted showed the serial number of the card I had on file. During this time, he continued to berate and taunt me from all of his aliases, even asking me tech support questions on how to fix the undervolting mod I had done to the card. I remained silent.
My favorite quote. "being a scammer dosen't make someone a bad person, it just makes them smart for being able to outwit other people into handing over free money. Thanks for all your help I really appreciate it. Fuck you, and have a nice day. Next time you shouldn't throw your money around like it's a boomerang causes it's not gonna come flying back to you every time something dosen't go your way. i know my morals and taking money from people who have nothing better to do with it than throw it around like it's nothing on the internet dosen't seem like a crime to me."
At this point I was ready to board a plane and confront this punk.
Instead I compiled all of the information I could find on this dude, and created a 20 page document of evidence. That's when I contacted the police in his local hometown. It was met with a luke warm response, so I contacted the local news station and explained everything to a reporter. A day or so went by and I was contacted by a local officer that was friends of the reporter.
Fast forward a few days, the officer had visited the homes of both this kid, and his friend. The kid emails me crying, WHY DID YOU SEND THE COPS, why would you do this to me? Shortly after that I begin getting emails from his 'father', on how it's my fault that I didn't verify his age, and I'm forcing his child without permission to trade money for a video card, and contributing to video game addiction. How it's not their responsibility to pay for people selling "stuffs to child" without parent's knowing. "Are you still trying to finish trade with children?". On and on. So I press full charges with the police.
End of the story, Mom gets involved, apologizes, and sends me the full amount in Paypal + shipping and fees. Best part is I actually got WAY more than the value of the card, because I had set the original MSRP as a starting point. Done.
I wish you guys could read the entire email saga, and all of my documentation. But hopefully that's enough to get the gist :)
- eloff 7y agoA total waste of time for the return of course, but it's satisfying just to read the story, it must have been even better for you. Nicely done.
- NotHereNotThere 7y agoAlthough you probably have better things to do than redacting a 20 page PDF for random internet strangers, it would've been an interesting read ;)
- Alex3917 7y agohttps://www.fwdeveryone.com https://www.fwdeveryone.com and/or https://www.prettyfwd.com https://www.prettyfwd.com If overcast was using Gmail this would take like 30 seconds to upload using PrettyFWD, or less than 5 min using FWD:Everyone.
- technics256 7y agoWow. What am incredible story. I assume he stopped after that? I can imagine someone like that holding a grudge for a long time too...
- overcast 7y agoNo idea, I contemplated trying to contact others who he had scammed, but I just wanted to be done with it. That little shit wasted way too much of my time. It was less about the money, and more of the point of not letting him win for being such a little arrogant asshole about it.
- badrequest 7y agoI would read a blog post about this!
- oceanghost 7y agoIf I may tell a "me too" story... I used to run an IRC channel; it kept getting hacked. Every few days. None of the folks in my channel could stop it, nor could the IRC admins. I had no idea why this person was doing this or why he only seemed to attack us. Someone knew someone at IBM security, he somehow got us the guys phone number and called it. It turned out our hacker was a 16-year-old. We talked to his father for a bit, and never heard from him again.