Didn’t fall for it but one time I was recruited to be a secret shopper. They mailed me a cheque for 6,000 dollars with instructions to deposit the money into my chequing account and use it to make a money transfer with Western Union.
Once I got over the initial shock of the money I did some googling and found out how the scam worked. The troubling thing is that I was communicating with my parents the whole time and they never once clued in that what was happening was suspicious.
How does the scam work?
99.99% it’s a refund scam. The cheque was probably designed to bounce.
I’m not entirely sure how cheques work being that I’ve not used one in about 15 years, but I’d imagine they give a cheque from an account with no money. Because cheques are awful the money will appear in your account for a time period by which you are given the illusion of getting legit money. They ask you to buy something like jewellery or gift cards and ask for it back at the end, maybe letting you keep a bit of it for yourself. A while goes by and the cheque bounces, which means you’re then on the hook for the cost of everything you purchased and the scammer gets a ton of free items that they can then sell on.
so the check is bad, but it takes several days for the bank to notice apparently. and for some reason, when they do finally notice, it’s your problem not theirs?
there are several ways this one could have worked, depending on the next step.
the typical scam is: the scammer sends a check for way more than they’re supposed to, then they ask the victim to refund the difference, but the check was bad. by the time the victim figures out the check has bounced, the scammer’s got the money that the victim “refunded”.
in this case, likely the potential victim would either have been directed to a storefront that’s affiliated with the scammer, where they can sell you $6,000 worth of junk. then the check bounces, and they have all the money you just spent.
or, they send you to real jewelry stores to buy real gold and diamonds, and you don’t notice the check has bounced until after you’ve mailed them away.
got a phone call that I owed money on some loan that I had taken out like 10 years earlier. they had enough information correct to make me actually believe I might have done it (I’m a former junkie, and did a lot of dumb fucking things to get money, plus decent sized holes in my memory).
I was planning on doing research before sending money, but as soon as I explained exactly how the conversation had gone to a friend of mine, they were like “that’s a scam”. and as soon as they set it, it was so fucking obvious too.
I’m a lot less inclined to make fun of people who get phished or social engineered
Online bartending school. I cancelled after 5 minutes of reflection.
I had a scam that netted me in no change in money whatsoever.
These scammers offer you this “you’ll rate these stuff on sites and we’ll give you money”, after completing a first batch and they give you some money, they’ll try to get the victim to believe they are legit. After believing that you’re trusting them enough, they pull the ponzi card “for next missions pay us 30-1000$ 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.
Nice idea, scammers! Weeding out what works and doesn’t with this feedback! But it won’t work on meeeeeee
This absolute bastard said he would give a rune platebody to the person that traded him the highest value item as a sign of trust… lost a DDP++ to that jerk.
Which sounds like a joke, but that was a real eye-opening experience for 8 year old me. Enough that 20+ years later I still reflect on it on an almost daily basis, to remind myself that if something seems like a bleedingly obvious scam it invariably is.
Lol when I was 15 or so I got way into competitive pokemon, and that eventually led to me breeding my own mons. Early on in my journey, I met some dude on Serebii chat that wanted to to do a 2 for 1 trade for my kingdra. He just sent over the pidgey and didn’t send over the other mon. I was really salty about that.
by the time gen four ended, I had bred a flawless Kingdra and (still to this day even) have all my .pkm files backed up on a hard drive somewhere.
Where would one go to look into backing up Pokemon?
…and if they’re backed up, why not Gen them? Haha
I guess it’s the satisfaction of knowing they’re truly legit.
Lol so the program I used was called HyperGTS. You could change the DSs target server, and you changed into to your routers IP, and then you could send stuff up to the GTS, at which case it would be saved into your PC. You could send it back the same way. I also have my .sav files. I might have gotten into the switch games if there was an easier way to transfer my old pokemon over.
The practice of cloning was (and I have to imagine, still is) pretty standard among breeders. Most competitive pokemon was (and again, still is) tool assisted: We made use of tools to check IVs, and to clone. The mons themselves were not altered. That was the point; no one cared if you were battling with hacked mons, as long as they were legal. There were still events that checked legitimacy, and those created a demand for legit mons. That being said, once RNG became standard issue, I just bred because I was playing in the pre RNG days and I liked them.
Is “Gen” the new pokesav?
Thanks for that! That’s some good stuff for me to look into.
Gen is just the word I saw people using for “generated Pokemon”. It was probably Pokesav, but obviously I’ve never gotten too deep into the scene, haha
When I was playing that game as a youngling, someone asked me to help get some wine from a cult temple. I did, which made the door slam shut and every cultist in the room attack me. I just barely made it out of there alive.
Then they told me to go get a second one. Yeah, they didn’t need wine, they wanted me to die to a trap so they could take my stuff without killing me.
I’m embarrassed to say I actually went to get that second wine.
I fell for the same thing back in the day. Probably where my trust issues began….
I don’t have trust issues, and I think that might actually be worse. Like, if that happened now, I’d only shirk at going in twice, but I’d still go in once.
My RuneScape account got rinsed because of my teenage stupidity in the early 2000’s, learned a very valuable lesson and haven’t been scammed since.
That’s why I’m glad lemmy censors your password if you write it in a comment, For instance: /*******
All I see is
hunter2
I got lured for my bandos armor back in the day, I stopped playing for a couple of years after that one
I learned about Pump and Dump the hard way. 🤷♂️
What is this? Breast milk when drinking alcohol??
It’s an old scam classically done with penny stocks and in modern times with crypto. Scammer buys up a whole bunch of garbage investments, cold calls a bunch of inexperienced investors and gets them to buy in (the pump), the price of the investment shoots up, and the scammer sells all their shares before the price collapses (the dump.)
It’s actually illegal, but people still get away with it.
Rough times when you’re forced to go at a sketchy gas station 😖
When i was a kid i’ve fallen into thoses fakes instagram accounts of celebrities asking you to call a number to get an iphone
The American Dream.
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.
In a trains station gave someone enough money for a ticket cuz he was claiming that he lost his train. Felt real stupid when I saw him the next day asking the same shit.
I fell for this one in college. At the time I felt really stupid, but it was less than $20 and that guy probably needed it more than I did.
This happened to me in a Walmart parking lot with a guy telling me a sob story about how he’s traveling with his family and out of gas (with a gas can in his hand). I didn’t give him any money but saw him there in the parking lot a couple weeks later and he gave the same story obviously not recognizing me from before.
Consider that at the time you were helping a stranger with the relatively trivial cost of a train ticket.
Now you know you “helped” a likely homeless dude.
Technically a scam but a pretty minor one.
Train tickets by me cost 4x an hour of minimum wage work. Even if a single person helped per hour, that’s more than enough to make it worthwhile compared to a paying job. That’s a scam, taking advantage of people’s help as a regular living rather than making an honest living.
That’s a much more costly train ticket than I was imagining.
I was assuming something like the inverse of that: a quarter of an hour of minimum wage.
That does tip the scale back to scammy.
Person you responded to was not the original poster. Not sure why they’ve felt the need to inject extra information that is entirely unrelated to the comment you replied to. Seems pretty scammy to me
I guess I just got scammed.
Train tickets near me have a variable cost depending on how far you’re going, but the bus costs about 1/4 or 1/5 of minimum wage per hour…lol
Probably not homeless, pretty well dressed, that was probably his day job.
An assumption on my part.
I’ll argue that not everyone begging for coins is scamming though some probably are. Trying to figure out which is just a recipie for misery.
I paid for Windows 10 once. It was actually quite good at the beginning but then, through updates, Microsoft turned into intrusive garbage of a system pushing their shitty services and behaving like my laptop was their property. I’m still ashamed of that purchase. If you really need anything from Microsoft - pirate it.
I upgraded to Windows 11, and I regret it to this day.
I was forced to upgrade my work laptop by my company, and I basically lost two full days of productivity because of how truly shitty the new OS is. Still not back to normal productivity, and it’s been two weeks. Definitely felt like a scam…
Oh yeah? I paid for WIndows Vista. I mean it eventually upgraded to 7, 8, and 10. But that was it…
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. :(
When I was younger, like 15/16, I was working a job in a stone quarry during my spring break. Long days, hot sun but all cash and made decent money.
One of my neighbors whom I would briefly speak to all the time wanted to borrow some money. I think it was $400 or something. At that age, I wanted to help out and I wanted seem cool, so I lent it. He asked for a bit more and more and eventually it ended up to about $1100. My neighbor said their paycheck was coming ‘next week’ and could easily pay me back.
Next week never came. I followed up with the neighbor and they said something happened to their paycheck but the money was coming. He then said a showing of good faith, he’d give me his payslip as proof and that I needed to get it back to him so I he cash he check. Stupid me knew something to was up but because I was naiive and impressionable, I told him I trusted him and I’ll await the money.
I managed to get his number and I called to follow up again, but he had some girl answer the phone and when I asked to speak to him, she said, “Oh he’s getting cookies right now…”
A week later the phone was disconnected and then I didn’t see him for a while. I then moved out of the neighborhood.
Eventually I saw him a few years later and mentioned about the money that he owed me but he ‘wasn’t sure what I was talking about’. I long since before then realized the money was gone. Expensive lesson but that’s a story of how I got scammed.
That’s pretty expensive for the age, but cheap overall. I was in a similar situation with my coworker at the same age, but it was luckily about an order of magnitude smaller a loan. I mentioned it to my family and they sat me down to explain that I’d inadvertently given both of us a gift, just mine was in the form of experience.
I got lucky with that. I’d loaned a coworker money multiple times and he paid me back every time, sometimes with interest.
I guess I was cheaper than the payday loan places.
I still lend people money, I just don’t expect it back, and then it’s a nice surprise
