Scams you've encountered

[Quadocky]

Probably one scam that I fell for was one that was an appeal to emotion. It was very clever actually, I even knew he was a scammer but went through with it anyway because morality.

Of course, in the end they got banned and probably lost maybe nigh a $1000 in software.

But really though, how greedy and manipulative and anti-social do you have to be to try to scam people on a closed system like Steam? The person was obviously intelligent enough to string along quite a bunch of coherent sentences that could easily convince most people yet not enough to realize that the system they are using pretty much logs every transaction and that they will only end up unhappy in the end.

 

[Xannidel]

A few years ago my grandmother got a call from some people saying that their grandson, aka me, was recently in an automobile accident and needed a lot of money to pay my medical bill. When "I" talked to her "I" sounded really mucked up which I suppose COULD happen depending on how bad of an accident I was really in. "I" was apparently really rude as were the people calling and luckily my grandmother called my dad to see if this really happened. It did not happen and it makes me sad as a human being that people would act so rude to an grandmother who is around 80-85 years old. My dad also got a phone call within the next hour or so with the same bull. The problem was that I was talking to him face to face when the call came through so when he answered it he handed me the phone and I gave them a piece of my mind. We could not track them through their fax number or anything like that either which sucked but we never heard from them again.

What also freaked me out was that I have a special nickname for my grandmother and the person who was supposed to be me actually knew that nickname. That REALLY creeps me out that someone would know that nickname and use it to try and get money out of it.

 

[Riddle78]

I remember this one because of just how painfully obvious it was.

I'm a fairly computer savvy person. I can easily diagnose issues with my computer,and realize when something is wrong at it's earliest stages. So,I REPEATEDLY get calls from this guy claiming to be from Microsoft,saying that they received a notification that my computer "may or may not have a fatal software error",and they required me to open a tunnel to their network so they can "diagnose" it. I knew immediately that they were just fishing for network information,or passwords,or some other such shenanigans,as Microsoft would never take the initiative on something like that,instead reacting to a call from a customer. I outright told the guy that I know exactly what I'm doing with my computer,and he can take his half-baked scam and stick it where it fits.

And then he called two weeks later. The conversation was him getting halfway through his introduction,with me cutting him off with, "We already went down this road. Stick it where it fits,con man." Never got a call from him again.