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.
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 😆
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.
My bank sometimes call me with questions about verification, as I travel a lot and have weird purchase patterns that can span several continents over a few days.
But it’s easy for me to verify that it’s them: Not only is Norwegian a rare language among Nigerian princes, but I use a tiny local bank so I recognize them by the dialect.
And even if it were a scam verification, they only ask for relatively inconsequential information, such as how much I have in my savings account, where I use my card the most, and roughly how much is paid into my account by my employer every month.
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.
Got duped into giving my login info to a dude who promised to put money into my bank. Lost my account for like a week, and when I finally recovered it, they had taken what little I had. I cried.
Runescape as a child was a good place to learn life lessons
Hahahaha I also just posted a story about being a kid on RuneScape!
Mine was about a guy who told me he could get me good gear and walked me out to the wilderness and killed me.
Ouch. My heart goes out to you.
2 minutes to realize I couldn’t log in because someone else was logged in as me wasn’t an error. 3 minutes to realize and verify the login page was a clone. An eternity to change my password immediately. The bot had already handed off 1.6B in gold, my many many feathers, lobsters, swordfish, and ores. Probably my armors too. Never even left the Grand Exchange. I raged and then I cried. Haven’t played it since.
Sad memories, but good lessons for adults too.
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.
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?
MLMs can be actually viable jobs for a very select few of people. Not entirely unlike how you can theoretically make money at a casino. There need to be winners to the game once in a while, or else no one would play. The game is just rigged wildly out of your favor.
The general structure of an MLM as I understand it is sort of a cross between a wholesale job and playing a mobile gacha game. Unlike a normal business where you purchase stock to match your demand, and only stock items that actually sell, an MLM contractually obligates you to buy a certain volume of stock, and each shipment is essentially a lootbox full of who knows what. It then becomes your responsibility to get rid of the stock any way you possibly can.
When you buy all that stock, you are not buying it from a factory or a warehouse. You are buying it from another person in the same position as you, one layer up. They are also playing the lootbox gacha and trying to get rid of all the crap. Except, hmm, now they have at least one person beneath them who is contractually forced to buy from them, and can’t select which stock they’re buying. Gee, I wonder what you’re gonna be getting…
Whenever you actually do manage to sell something off, a cut of that kicks back to the person who sold you that stock. And a piece of that kickback goes to the person who sold them that stock, and so on, up and up.
The real money in MLMs is having so many people beneath you that the kickbacks start adding up into significant income. This is theoretically achievable. But it requires a very specific kind of personality matrix who is not squeamish about being a little cut-throat to get ahead, and generally requires a significant investment where you are going deep into the red just for the opportunity. And even if you do make it there, you have to accept the knowledge that your profitability can only exist necessarily because of the existence of many people beneath you all spinning those slots and losing the rigged game to the house (who by this point is you).
Like all these multi-level-marketing scams, the scam part is that you have to buy your stock from the company/from your “upline”, and then whether or not you make money depends on you reselling your stock.
John Oliver did an excellent video on the overall topic. Definitely worth the watch.
Fun fact: MLMs cannot be made illegal because they’re a quintessential expression of pure capitalism.
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.
Oh ok, good to know! They’re always lumped in with MLMs so I always thought they were one. I appreciate the correction, even if they still have a predatory business model—just a different one than MLMs.
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.
The fact that you count as a dependent on FAFSA until well after your parents don’t write you as a dependant is wild.
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.
Moving into a new neighborhood with my girlfriend. We each lived in different parts of town and worked different schedules, so each arranged for separate moves. I had just finished unloading my stuff. Friendly neighbor walked over to say hello. We started chatting. Nice guy.
At some point, he mentioned something about having to head home for a pizza party. Checked his wallet and he was short. We all know where this is heading so I’ll skip to the end. It only cost me $40. Never saw him again.
Lesson learned.
When I was younger I read somewhere “If you give someone $20 and never see them again, it was probably worth it.” Accounting for inflation I think that perfectly fits your situation.
Lol, I’d rather be a nice person and short $40 than a jerk to every new friendly person I met.
I moved into a new place, there was a tenant in private suite downstairs.
We hung out here and there and I fronted him for a couple restaurant meals over a few weeks.
When I started asking for him to pay me back he laughed and said no, you shouldn’t give money to strangers.
I let the landlord know, he didn’t care, we stopped talking and I eventually moved out.
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. :(
In college I lost one of my jobs and knew I needed another one fast or I wouldn’t be able to make rent. I spammed my resume on Indeed and Monster.
I got an email offering an IT-adjacent job in town. It was Saturday and they said I could stop by in a few weeks to fill out the paperwork or we could do it over the phone and start Monday. I called so I could get my first paycheck before the end of the month. We eventually got to her asking for my Social Security number and I froze.
I realized this could be a scam, but I was really desperate. I tried to think of a way to test them, so I said that I just realized I would be unavailable during certain hours, would that still be okay? She said she had to put me on hold to talk to the manager. After a while she came back and said it should work, but I would have to discuss the specifics with my supervisor once I started.
That sounded real to me. If it was a scam surely she would have just immediately said my schedule was fine, right? I gave her my SSN. She said I was ready to go and to have fun on Monday. I got there and it was just a parking lot. Couldn’t get a response via phone or email.
A couple months later I found out someone across the country had used my SSN and I had to freeze my credit.
The problem is you have to give your SSN for legitimate employers as well. It is mind-bogglingly stupid that there’s a magic number you have to keep secret and also have to give to everyone to participate in modern economy.
One time when I was in middle school I started playing RuneScape, and there was this helpful guy hanging out in the starting area. He told me he could get me better gear if I followed him. He took me to the wilderness and killed me and stole all my stuff. I didn’t really know anything about the game so I thought that without my precious starting gear I would be lost, so I started a new account.
And then once I had played a lot and understood the game better, I made a bunch of sets of steel armor and food and I hung out in the starting area and gave it out for free to new players. Because fuck that guy. I decided I would take his evil and turn it into kindness.
I honestly don’t know what he had to gain, the starting gear is worthless. Maybe he just liked fucking people over.
I remember having the same thing happen to me in RS
In high school, i was watching a movie online free and got a popup from the FBI. I panicked and closed instead of paying the $99. After the panic cooled, I was so glad my panic response is running away. Clearly a spam popup
Purchasing my first home, apparently all info regarding the sale is public information. Companies scrape or buy this data and then spam your mailbox with various extra services. In my case, it was mortgage premium insurance or something like that. Anyways, the letter I received in the mail went something like this: “You forgot something important regarding your home purchase”. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like that.
I’m a first time home buyer and I am trying to stay on top of things. Of course, because they are able to get all the information regarding the sale. It looks legit, they have my name, address, loan number, loan amount, the bank serving the loan and everything. I call to make sure everything is alright and fortunately they didn’t answer. I took the extra time to look up what mortgage premium insurance even was and that is how I came across the fact that it may be a scam.
Anyways, they call me back eventually and by this time I am on to them. I ask some questions regarding their company and the entire time they keep repeating the name of the bank that is serving my loan, but refuse to give me the name of their company. After a bit more back and forth they finally let it slip that they are from some unrelated insurance company to which I decline their offer. I wanted to curse them out, but I just wasn’t raised that way.
Edit: A lot of people don’t take online privacy seriously. Usually going whats the harm. I was never really comfortable with it to the point of apathy, but I was a bit lax at times. This experience made me find out first hand what the harm of everyone having access to your data is.
Pig butchering romance scam on Tinder. Matched with a pretty girl. Our conversation felt genuine. Even had a short video call. But things were feeling a bit too good to be true, but I went on to see where things were going.
Saw through the scam once she started offering helping with cryptocurrency investment, so I didn’t lose anything.
What does that have to do with pork products?
As the other person said. The metaphor is that you trick the person into making small investments first into a fake cryptocurrency app, and then over time make bigger and bigger investments. Like feeding a pig.
When the victim has made a large investment (the pig is well fed), cut all connection and run away with all the money (the butchering).
It’s a scam that targets emotionally vulnerable people and can go on for many weeks.
