I made a purchase on a sketchy site (during Covid when things were hard to find). A day or so later, some unauthorized transactions were made on my card. “Bank” called from actual number of my bank, to verify if I actually made the transactions. provided some of my personal information, transaction amount etc then asked to verify ssn. It was very convincing.
Luckily I refused because I know anyone can call you claiming to be any number, and I didn’t give out any info, and said I would call back that number (my bank).
Bank had no knowledge of a call.
15 minutes later, get real fraud department call from my bank. They just wanted to know if it was fraud or not and didn’t ask for any other info.
Moral of the story: if someone calls you, never give out personal info. Tell them you will call back if needed.
Someone contacted me on Steam and asked if I wanted to play TF2 with him. It was one of my most played games at the time and I had a TF2 avatar, so no surprises here.
That person later asked me to rate their TF2 team on some website. Didn’t care first but did it eventually. The website needed Steam auth but just faked the Steam auth and relayed every bit of information you entered to steal your account.
Quickly realized my mistake and reset my password before anything happened. Im still surprised how much effort went into this fake rating site just to steal some Steam accounts.
Had some Steam based scammer a couple months ago. I basically instantly suspected a scam and played along, trying them to waste time.
Sadly, they didn’t play along that much and ghosted me :(
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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.
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.
Probably not homeless, pretty well dressed, that was probably his day job.
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.
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.”
Edit: Its not really a pyramid scheme… They just do everything they can to weasel out of giving you your paycheck on payday and because it’s sales commission, I don’t think they have to follow minimum wage laws since you’re not paid hourly.
Unless they’ve seriously changed how it fundamentally works (this was when I was 18). They never encouraged or paid extra for getting others to sell for you, like a typical MLM thing.
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.
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.
I went to what I thought was a job interview, but they were really just recruiting people to sell Cutco stuff. I was still pretty excited about it, because I’d never heard of Cutco before. When I got home, Dad explained that Cutco was basically a pyramid scheme.
They almost got me. They had rented space in an office park and everything; it wasn’t at some dude’s house. The interview seemed legit… to a young and clueless college student, anyway.
I once had one of those crypto-people message me with a sales pitch, asking for money to help start their small business in Africa or something like that (can’t remember what, I think it was a micro-brewery)
As an actual business owner, their initial ideas sounded okay, and I began forwarding them resources on how to secure a low-interest loan from their government and grants and stuff like that and then they abruptly closed up with:
“This is scam, brother. This is scam. You have good heart. I tell you only once, do not message this number.”
We forget that on the other end of scams are real people with real problems, morals, and lives. The person on the other end of your scam probably started to feel bad and helped you out. And likely that person is being forced into performing these scams on people.
There’s an excellent “Search Engine” podcast episode about this that came out recently called “Who’s behind these scammy text messages we’ve all been getting.” It’s well worth a listen because it dives into all the slavery and human trafficking involved in modern scams that people aren’t aware of.
The especially vile thing about these scam centers is that often they trick normal people just trying to find work and support their family. They steal their passport and then hold them hostage with slave labour.
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.
Oh yeah? I paid for WIndows Vista. I mean it eventually upgraded to 7, 8, and 10. But that was 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…
got an email during university that I had been given access to an array of digital resources for free, all I had to do was link my university email credentials. Only after I had already done that did I realize how sketchy it was, but then it did actually turn out to be legit. Wish i remembered/still had access I remember there being some good stuff on there
When I was 16 I looked a bit older, so people would often assume I was over 18.
I was in Boston one day wandering around and I was approached by someone who wanted to give me a free personality test or something. He was handsome and I was a young gay boy so I figured why not?
It ended up being a scientology recruitment. They freaked and stopped trying to hard sell me their book when I told them I was 16. And their recruitment video had me laughing like crazy as I walked out.
I didn’t know how crazy of a cult they are at the time. But it was a funny experience.
i did that test and got a ~$40 book for free 😆
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.
Student loans for in-person university. I’ll be paying for that for a long time.
Eventually dropped out and finished my degree with WGU. I highly recommend that for anyone considering a college degree. I was able to finish with PELL grants so I added no debt and have a degree
Student loans had to be a top answer. The fact that they even call loans “student aid” is bonkers. There were two events with student loans that really drove that home for me.
First, there was a school I was considering applying to that advertised that they would pay 100% of what the government determined was your family’s need. They had 2 admission windows, one “early-decision” with a good chance of getting in, that was before when the govt releases their estimates of your need, and another with abysmal acceptance rates, but after you’d know the cost. For someone without money, you would have to give them a binding agreement to go there if accepted without knowing what you will end up paying, or you likely wouldn’t be accepted at all. I ended up not applying, but if I had, I could have attended a good school for around $3,000 per year, including room and board.
Second, one year i was in college, my parents (who weren’t paying for any of my education) made less money. This made the government offer me higher loans. Because I could get more “student aid” from the government (loans), my school reduced my scholarships.
Years ago I was approached by a guy in a suit while working my shitty retail job. He was trying to recruit me to a pyramid scheme. I knew what was going on from the get go and just wanted to do a morbid curiosity suicide burn on it. Met him for an “interview” at a Starbucks and gave me like 10 CDs with talks from their independent business owners(lol) talking about how great it is and how much money they are making. He later invited me to a meeting at a hotel where they had a guy give a speech about the schtick in the conference hall with interviews played on a projector of success stories in tropical mansions.
I felt like, but don’t know, that I might have been the only person there who knew what was going on. I talked to a few people who were also being recruited and they didnt seem to see what was going on. There were a lot of people there that really drank the Kool aid and had their dreams of not living paycheck to paycheck taken advantage of.
The guy who recruited me sat down with his wife, myself and another recruit and wanted to get us all signed up. I told him I didn’t want to join a pyramid scheme. He tried to explain to me how it wasn’t a pyramid scheme. I “wanted to get things straight” and drew a diagram on a napkin of the company structure, he confirmed my understanding was correct, I drew a triangle around it. The other recruit figured it out. The guy was trying to make me feel bad about not understanding how big of an opportunity I was throwing away, it did not work.
All the products they sold were crap. I looked at their website and couldn’t find fuckall that I or anyone would actually want to buy if they weren’t compelled to by being involved.
If you ever get someone trying to get you to do a pyramid scheme and they have one of those conference hall talks, do it if it is free just so you can enjoy the spectacle of con-men working in the open.
I tried the draw the triangle around it trick with a coworker who was getting sucked into LuLaRoe.
They 180ed that shit and drew the CEO, his direct reports, the next layer and was like… “How is this not the same. All companies are in a pyramid”
That’s when I just let it go and let her get scammed.
I went to buy Norton Antivirus. (This was… probably almost 25 years ago?) I went to
https://symantic.com/. The correct domain name washttps://symantec.com. (“e” vs “i”).https://symantic.com/went to a page owned by… I think it was Avast. But the page was (in retrospect) very obviously meant to look like it was made by Symantec/Norton. It had images of cardboard boxes like software CDs used to come in and such, in exactly the Norton yellow/orange.I went through their purchase funnel and installed Avast before I realized it wasn’t Norton. As soon as I realized it, I immediately uninstalled it. I don’t remember if I found any way to contact Avast, but I did call the credit card company and contested the charge. Avast contested the… con…test…ment…? I appealed and Avast gave up.
And I bought Norton.
