Scams you've encountered

[triggrhappy94]

Having recently graduated High School and moved onto college, I've encountered a couple (convincing at first glance) scams. Both of them promise success with hard work, but ultimately you end up paying.

Shortly after graduating High School, I got a letter in the mail from "Vector International" or something like that. This will probably seem familiar to a lot of people. I was excited at first by the prospect that finding work could be that easy, but after reading I got the feeling of "too good to be true". I immediately looked them up on line and everything I found said that they were a scam.
For those not familiar with the proccess: Vector is a knife supply company. You have to buy a demo set (or at least you used to have to) which sets you back over a hundred bucks. From there you have to go door to door, or call people.
I actually knew a couple people who ended up doing it. One of them told me her boss was a total ass, and you only get paid if you can arrange presentations or make sales.

The second: College Works Painting. Some random person pasted out little pieces of paper before a lecture, asking for our contact information for an "internship". I filled it out, hoping to be able to build work experience and all that. I got a call from someone claiming to be following up on it. There was a short telephone interview, and she scheduled a meeting with me the next day (today). I met with her at the campus coffee place (there should be big red lights going off in people's heads by this point) with four other people. She explained how great the company is. About half way through she handed out pamphlets which were filled with grammatical errors. Two of the people just left (the better idea).
From what I read online, you work as a manager (not a real intern) and manage a branch of a home-painting business. Fourty percent of the revenue goes to the company, then you pay for supplies and labor. If there's anything left, you can keep it. Most of the time, between the competition and poor design, you end up either in the hole or making a couple dollars an hour.

 

[tippy2k2]

Only one that I distinctly remember (namely because I fell for it...)

In college, I received a call from this membership club thingy. They were doing test runs of their service by offering two free magazine subscriptions of the person's choice to try out the club...

Fuck me. This "money saving club" charges you $150 per month to be part of it (which you became part of with this "free" magazine subscription). I have no fucking clue how they got my account information since I never gave it to them but all of a sudden my account was losing money. Attempted to cancel....HA! I STILL might have a fucking membership since I never found a way to cancel it.

Now in full panic mode, I do something real drastic: I shut down my bank account. SUCK ON THAT MEMBERSHIP PEOPLE!!!!

So I lost $150 and had to shut down a bank account. Lesson learned: If it's free, assume there's a catch.

 

[SomeLameStuff]

Oh yeah. Had a guy call my house phone and ask me for $10000 to get my daughter back.

Problem: I was 15 at the time, and sure as hell didn't have a daughter. AND scams like that had already hit the news, and the cops were telling people to watch out for it.

 

[tippy2k2]

Oh yeah. Had a guy call my house phone and ask me for $10000 to get my daughter back.

Problem: I was 15 at the time, and sure as hell didn't have a daughter. AND scams like that had already hit the news, and the cops were telling people to watch out for it.

Wha.....uh.....huh....whaaa?

How would that even work? Let's say, for fun, that they get ahold of a father who has a daughter and looked up "Gullible" in the dictionary when his friend told him that it was the first word written in there.

"OH MY GOD!" the father (who is not Liam Neeson or else you'd get a different speech) yells in a panic. "Of course I'll pay!"

...now what? You don't just have $10,000 on hand (unless you're a drug dealer of course) so you would need some time to get the money. Maybe in the few hours or so it would take for you to get to your bank and explain that you need $10,000 for...stuff...you would at some point, you know, give your daughter a call?

 

[SomeLameStuff]

Wha.....uh.....huh....whaaa?

How would that even work? Let's say, for fun, that they get ahold of a father who has a daughter and looked up "Gullible" in the dictionary when his friend told him that it was the first word written in there.

"OH MY GOD!" the father (who is not Liam Neeson or else you'd get a different speech) yells in a panic. "Of course I'll pay!"

...now what? You don't just have $10,000 on hand (unless you're a drug dealer of course) so you would need some time to get the money. Maybe in the few hours or so it would take for you to get to your bank and explain that you need $10,000 for...stuff...you would at some point, you know, give your daughter a call?

I have no idea, but one guy paid up $32000 before he realised his daughter was just fine.

 

[krazykidd]

Shortly after raduating High School, I got a letter in the mail from "Vector International" or something like that.

I did Vector (Cutco) for a summer. I wouldn't say they are a scam, at least not a total scam. It's quite possible for the right sort of person to make quite a lot of money from them. I know someone who did. You have to have salesmanship skills, but more importantly you have to know a lot of wealthy people. Since I had neither, I did very poorly. But that doesn't make them a scam.

Incidentally, I still have my Cutco demo set. The knives still cut just as well as they ever did after over 15 years of regular use.

My mother bought a copy of "Who's Who Among American High School Students". That's a scam.

This . I actually had an interview with them this summer . Then i went online and saw the comments . I pulled a no show , but it's not REALLY a scam , but a lot of people end up losin money instead of making money because their salementship sucks.

This is the only one i encounted other than bums coming up to me in the street for money.

 

[Duck Sandwich]

I like how a spambot is posting in a scam thread. How appropriate.

OT: I filled in some information (not credit card info) on some "work from home" site. Then I got some call from some dumbass asking me for money and asking me if I've seen the commercials with Tom Bosley. And he kept mentioning Tom Bosley every chance he got like he expected me to give a shit who Tom Bosley was. And then I got a bunch of viagra ads in my e-mail. Fuckers.

 

[Quaxar]

snip

Spambot scam in a thread about scams? This is the best thing I've seen all week!

 

[triggrhappy94]

Oh yeah. Had a guy call my house phone and ask me for $10000 to get my daughter back.

Problem: I was 15 at the time, and sure as hell didn't have a daughter. AND scams like that had already hit the news, and the cops were telling people to watch out for it.

You've told that story here before, haven't you?
I remember reading it.

 

[bananafishtoday]

Oh yeah. Had a guy call my house phone and ask me for $10000 to get my daughter back.

Problem: I was 15 at the time, and sure as hell didn't have a daughter. AND scams like that had already hit the news, and the cops were telling people to watch out for it.

Wha.....uh.....huh....whaaa?

How would that even work? Let's say, for fun, that they get ahold of a father who has a daughter and looked up "Gullible" in the dictionary when his friend told him that it was the first word written in there.

"OH MY GOD!" the father (who is not Liam Neeson or else you'd get a different speech) yells in a panic. "Of course I'll pay!"

...now what? You don't just have $10,000 on hand (unless you're a drug dealer of course) so you would need some time to get the money. Maybe in the few hours or so it would take for you to get to your bank and explain that you need $10,000 for...stuff...you would at some point, you know, give your daughter a call?

It's just a matter of volume. If there's an x chance that a person has access to $10,000, y chance of a person having a daughter they can't or don't think to immediately contact, and z chance of a person being susceptible to drawing conclusions about vague info like this (it's similar to how fortune tellers work--make vague, general statements and some people will draw and verbalize specific conclusions, giving you more info to work with), then on average you'll find someone to dupe every 1/xyz calls. It's why mail/email scams are so effective. Maybe (to make up a number) only 1 out of a 10,000 are dumb/inexperienced/greedy enough to fall for the Nigerian prince thing, but if you email 100,000 people, you'll get a few marks. They tend to be elderly people, since they tend not to be as sharp as the rest of us, and many have access to large pools of capital in the form of retirement funds.

There was a particularly clever mail scam I read about once that went something like this: person mails a bunch of people saying he has insider info on some binary event, like which team will win a sports game. Includes the predicted winner of a future game and instructions on how to reply for more predictions. Sends, say, the next 4 for free to those who show interest, then asks for a sum of money for the next one. It works by just sending 50% of people one result and 50% of people the other. They halve their pool of marks every time, but if they cast a wide enough net, they'll have a significant number of people who just got five accurate predictions in a row, and many of them may be dumb enough to believe the next prediction is a sure thing.

OT: Living in a city, I encounter plenty of con artists with sob stories, and most are pretty forgettable "Nope, sorry" kinda encounters. This one, I was walking home at like 1am or something, and some guy came up to me with a story about how he went to a party or something, didn't know the neighborhood, lost his friends, got robbed, and now had no way to get home. Asked for $12 for a cab. (A few obvious signs right there: One, we were a few blocks from the $2.25 train; two, how would he know the expected cab fare home if he didn't know the hood he was in; three, $12 is a good number because it's around $10 but can net the person $20 if the mark doesn't have change and really wants to "help.") I said no, went home, didn't think much of it.

What made it memorable was a couple months later, I was walking home at like 1am or something, and some guy came up to me with a story about how he went to a party or something, didn't know the--

"************, you tried that same story on me a couple months ago."

"...oh. Shit. Sorry."

 

[lechat]

the first scam is not so much a scam as it is a wide reaching sales team that penalizes failure. in fact if i'm not mistaken Avon uses the same method and when i left school about a million years ago i attended a "job interview" with roughly 300 other people using the same tactic to sell vitamins, if you have ever seen someone with a "lose weight now ask me how" badge then you know someone who has fallen for it

OT buddy of mine got a text saying someone had put a hit out on him but the hitman would let him live if he received 10,000 dollars

 

[thesilentman]

One scam involved someone posing as a police officer on the phone. My mom (understandably) got really scared until I talked to him. The conversation went like this:

Me: "Hello?"
GuyOnThePhone: "Yes, this is the police speaking. We're coming to arrest *my mom*. Is she there right now?
Me: "What for?"
GOTP: "Failing to pay taxes when you lived at *previous address*."

I put down the phone, and started laughing like a madman. And before anyone asks, no, you do not get arrested for failing to pay taxes. He called back and said that they were coming to our house. I calmly told him that I was going to confirm whether they were legitimate by calling 911 and confirming that my mom failed to pay taxes and if she was under arrest.

We never heard from those guys again after that as they made the mistake of calling my dad next. Trolling ensued...

 

[tippy2k2]

It's just a matter of volume. If there's an x chance that a person has access to $10,000, y chance of a person having a daughter they can't or don't think to immediately contact, and z chance of a person being susceptible to drawing conclusions about vague info like this (it's similar to how fortune tellers work--make vague, general statements and some people will draw and verbalize specific conclusions, giving you more info to work with), then on average you'll find someone to dupe every 1/xyz calls. It's why mail/email scams are so effective. Maybe (to make up a number) only 1 out of a 10,000 are dumb/inexperienced/greedy enough to fall for the Nigerian prince thing, but if you email 100,000 people, you'll get a few marks. They tend to be elderly people, since they tend not to be as sharp as the rest of us, and many have access to large pools of capital in the form of retirement funds.

There was a particularly clever mail scam I read about once that went something like this: person mails a bunch of people saying he has insider info on some binary event, like which team will win a sports game. Includes the predicted winner of a future game and instructions on how to reply for more predictions. Sends, say, the next 4 for free to those who show interest, then asks for a sum of money for the next one. It works by just sending 50% of people one result and 50% of people the other. They halve their pool of marks every time, but if they cast a wide enough net, they'll have a significant number of people who just got five accurate predictions in a row, and many of them may be dumb enough to believe the next prediction is a sure thing.

That...makes a lot of sense. You'd like to think that someone at the bank would question why Old Man Moneybags just came in for a large withdrawal but I suppose this just needs to work a few times for them to get their money's worth.

 

[Rawne1980]

Oh yeah. Had a guy call my house phone and ask me for $10000 to get my daughter back.

And then the scammer phones up the grumpy bloke with the teenage nightmare daughter and the bloke says "i'll give it 2 hours and then i'll be charging you 10.000 to take her back off you".

 

[Saulkar]

Someone kept calling in a Chinese accent to tell me that I had won a Caribbean cruise, all expenses paid. Worst part was his painfully abysmal grasp of the English language. I had an old phone at the time with some exposed components in back that I could bridge with a piece of metal that generated an agonising screech for whomever is on the receiving end. Let me just say that after he could not answer any basic questions such as what my name was, where this call was coming from, how I won, or even what country he was calling they cycled through a couple more, slightly less deaf guys then never phoned again.

 

[Asita]

Not sure if this one qualifies as a 'scam' in as many words, but it set off all kinds of warning bells for me.

I got a cold-call email from an apparent marketing company. Being in the job market and having put up a resume on Monster, I found it a bit odd, but not unwelcome. I contacted them, they asked me to come in for an interview. I went in, they gave me something I quickly recognized as a pre-screening, gave me a small folder of materials and told me to read them over for a phone interview the next day. Looking it over I noticed a few details: 1) the name of the company listed on the paper didn't match up with the one I'd been introduced to. 2) The role had a very fancy title for what was effectively a door-to-door salesman who sold adspace for school sporting events, 3) They were very insistent on a hard-sell methodology and 4) Their pay scale was dependent on sales per week (Not commissions, persay, but an apparent tiered salary). Called for the phone interview the next day, was greeted by telling me I'd connected to the company listed on the paper rather than the one I'd met, who immediately started fast-talking me, telling me that I'd get a test run on monday, where I'd go to a certain commercial parking lot and prepare for a full days' work, calling this guy from time to time between pitches. From there we'd see if I really wanted to do this.

My prior misgivings nonwithstanding, that set off alarm bells. They planned to have me represent the company before I was even hired, with neither training nor supervision and without even so much as a formal interview[footnote]the 'phone-interview' even acknowledged as much when I commented on the prior day being a pre-screening, and he didn't ask any questions of me[/footnote]. Wild Rivers put more effort into vetting me and training me, and my role there was just to sit at the top of the rides and make sure people didn't go down on top of one another. Again, I'm not sure I'd call it a scam persay, but I simply cannot trust a company that puts so little apparent effort into human resources that they'll let anyone who answers an application represent their company without question.

 

[Comocat]

I was selling a chair or something on Craigslist and got an interested party. He then claimed that he accidentally mailed me a $2000 dollar check and if I would cash it for him and send him 1000 dollars I could keep the rest. I guess they mail you fake checks and get you to cash them for. Apparently this is a pretty popular scam for morons.

 

[Eternal_Lament]

I've never fallen for it, but I've run into the Microsoft phone scam.

For those who don't know, the scam works like this. You receive a call, and the caller says that they're some sort of representative from Microsoft, but are in fact just from some call center in India (easy to tell from the accent). The caller claims that your PC (doesn't matter what you actually have, they'll just say your Windows PC) is infected with multiple viruses, and that they need your permission to help clean it up. By using tactics such as making standard system errors seem like virus reports, they convince the person to go through some program that allows the person on the other end to take control of the computer, at which point they'll access whatever files are on their and just end the call there. It's been around for a while, and I've gotten at least three instances of this scam being attempted. You would think that at this point people would wise up, although apparently many still fall for it.

 

[Karma168]

Best one I've had is someone phoning the house offering computer repairs after they had detected a computer virus on our phone line. Now my mum is as tech-illiterate as they come so she passed them onto me, had a little listen to what they had to say and started spouting absolute nonsense - "ah so is it a php phishing worm with ascii coding and a dtxs subroutine?" - they said yes to it and I laughed at them til they hung up, made my day.