Lifestyle

<p><a href="https://www.someecards.com/news/news/hulu-netflix-fyre-festival-documentary-jerry-media/">The Fyre Festival.</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/nyregion/anna-delvey-sorokin.html">Anna Delvey.</a> <a href="https://splinternews.com/the-long-lucrative-right-wing-grift-is-blowing-up-in-t-1793944216">The Trump presidency.</a></p><p>We&#39;re living in a new golden age of famous scammers, but there are lesser-known scams creeping out of every corner of the internet. A recent Reddit thread had people confessing the times they fell for <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/canjua/have_you_ever_got_scammed_what_happened/">grifters and swindlers</a></p><p>A scam could really happen to anybody, but that doesn&#39;t mean you can&#39;t scoff and feel superior.</p><p>Pro tip: Don&rsquo;t go to an &quot;air traffic controller aptitude test&quot; you found on Craigslist.</p><h2>1. Hopefully <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/ocean_wavez/">ocean_wavez</a>&#39;s IQ has improved since the Disney days.</h2><blockquote> <p>When I was 11 my favorite Disney Channel star tweeted a link to take an IQ test and see how your score compared to hers. A credit card number was needed to see the results, so I put in my parents&rsquo;. Of course she had been hacked and it was a scam, so I had to go sheepishly tell my parents I accidentally charged their credit card...they were not happy.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><hr /><h2>2. Don&#39;t worry, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/burnt-cookie/">burnt-cookie</a>&#39;s story has a happy ending. Candy.</h2><blockquote> <p>I bought $300+ tickets to see Knicks at MSG from Craigslist (dumb I know) that turned out to be fake. I got so pissed I walked into an nyc precinct and told them i want to file a complaint.</p> <p>The detective at the time said they&rsquo;re busting a lot of people in these fake ticket rings and we could bust him if we set up another sale. The next day I contacted the same guy from another number and we set up to meet him; the detective was dressed casually and I pretended to be his gf. He gave us the tickets by Dylan&rsquo;s Candy bar and was busted right there. It was fun.</p> </blockquote><hr /><h2>3. You almost have to respect the hustle, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/orangey41/">orangey41</a>.</h2><blockquote> <p>I was 19 and looking for jobs on Craigslist. Came across an ad for air traffic controller training. Take an aptitude test, and if you pass you&#39;ll be eligible for government-paid job training.</p> <p>The scam was actually brilliant. The test was in a hotel banquet room and cost $200 to take. You pay at the door, and are directed to wait in the room and not talk to anyone. They pass out an actual test, tell you to finish in as fast a time as you can, then leave. Before it starts they tell you that only the top 10% will be contacted for follow-up.</p> <p>There were about 100 of us taking the test. Easy $20,000 for the scammers.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><hr /><h2>4. The only way to make <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/dougiebgood/">dougiebgood</a>&#39;s story more 90s is if it ended with &quot;WAZZZZZUP.&quot;</h2><blockquote> <p>In the 90&#39;s my friend got all of these letters saying he was a part of a contest, and he just had to keep mailing letters in to enter the &quot;drawing.&quot;</p> <p>The wording they put in the later letters was something like &quot;You&#39;ve made it to the final round,&quot; and &quot;Congratulations, we are now prepared to write you a check for $10,000!&quot;</p> <p>All he had to do was call a 1-900 number that charged $2 a minute. It took him about 10 minutes to navigate the automated menus once they told him he was a winner and it ended with &quot;And you have won... (drum roll)... ONE DOLLAR!&quot;</p> </blockquote><hr /><h2>5. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Hysterical_Realist/">Hysterical_Realist</a> knows a good scammer when they see one.</h2><blockquote> <p>I&#39;ve had my debit card number stolen twice. Once I was charged for over $700 in women&#39;s shoes (I&#39;m not a woman.) Another time, just a couple of months ago, I had five different $100 transfers on Western Union, at different convenience stores in my city that I&#39;d never visited.</p> <p>But the funniest one was the one I actually fell for in person. A guy on the street in New Orleans told me:</p> <p>&quot;I bet you ten bucks I can tell you where you got your shoes.&quot;</p> <p>&quot;You&#39;re on&quot;, I said.</p> <p>&quot;OK. You got &#39;em right there. On your feet.&quot;</p> <p>I gave him the ten bucks out of pure admiration.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><hr /><h2>6. She could have been the one, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/elezraita/">elezraita</a>!!!</h2><blockquote> <p>I met a girl on OKCupid who said she lived in New York City, but was planning a trip to Africa for a charity trip with her university. We talked for a while. She was cute and she claimed to like the same things I liked. She had weird English, though. Eventually, she went on her &ldquo;trip&rdquo;. When she got to Africa, we kept talking and eventually she told me a story about some terrible thing that had happened to her and she needed money. She tried to get me to send her $100. I had been suspicious for a while. Her English was often not like I would have expected from a native speaker from NYC. She made a lot of mistakes, but I just assumed that she was brought up in a home where English wasn&rsquo;t the first language, or spelling and grammar just weren&rsquo;t her thing. I actually asked her about it as diplomatically as I could, and she claimed to be a native English speaker. Also, I could never verify anything about her travel program or her family online. I did my research. There were other things, but I won&rsquo;t go into them. Asking me to send money to Africa via Western Union was the last straw. I noped out of that lickity split. Ghosted that filthy scammer completely.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><hr /><h2>7. &quot;Armitage&quot; sounds fashionable too, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/woke_trans_former/">woke_trans_former</a>.</h2><blockquote> <p>Got scammed by this guy selling &quot;Armani&quot; jackets in NYC from his car at 9PM on a Saturday. I happened to be in the market for these at the time, so I was very eager. He must have smelled a sucker. He slowed his car and asked me for directions to the Lincoln Tunnel. While I was looking that up on my phone, he gave his pitch about how he just came from an Armani show and had 2 extra jackets he couldn&#39;t fit in his luggage back to Italy. So I bought 2 jackets for $300 and thought I got a fantastic deal (they retail for more than $1000 each), all the way until I got to the train back to CT, when I noticed that the logo was not quite the Armani logo, but some other eagle logo. It also didn&#39;t say Armani, but Armitage. To be fair, he never said they were Armani jackets, only that he was coming from an Armani show. My 24-year-old-fresh-out-of-college dumbass brain filled in the non-existent gaps. The icing on the cake is that I actually had to withdraw cash from an ATM and I ended up overdrawing my account.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><hr /><h2>8. Hang this Met scam in the Louvre, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/h3llp0p/">h3llp0p</a>.</h2><blockquote> <p>Best scam I&#39;ve ever witnessed:</p> <p>I was working a job at the Metropolitan Museum in New York for a week around the sculpture garden area. There was an old man I noticed towards the end of every day sketching one of the more prominent sculptures. It was a very detailed pencil sketch that was quite beautiful. Towards the close of day a group of people would gather around the man who was nearly finished with his art. I began to notice that he would show up at the same time every day and the same sketch was at the same point of completion - every day. Turns out he was selling his &quot;sketches&quot; for a couple hundred bucks a pop, but they were actually high-res copies that he would trace over for an hour or so before unloading them on a romantic tourist looking for an authentic piece of art.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><hr /><h2>9. Poor <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/snoof123/">snoof123</a>. Screw those popcorn bandits.</h2><blockquote> <p>My first job was working at a movie theater. I was at the concessions stand and 1 guy came up, he ordered like a soda and popcorn. He handed me a $50 bill and during the same time his friend walked up and started asking me a lot of questions about the menu and crap. They purposely distracted me very skillfully and managed to walk away with the $50 bill and the change... I felt like a total idiot. They probably have been doing that for a long time.</p> </blockquote><hr /><h2>10. Always check the date, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/sortajamie/">sortajamie</a>.</h2><blockquote> <p>Bought football tickets outside the venue. Looked right, GA vs LSU and appropriate pics on the tickets. Tickets turned out to be two years old.</p> </blockquote><hr /><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>11. Damn, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/x3young3x/">x3young3x</a>&#39;s isn&#39;t funny, it&#39;s just elder abuse.</h2><blockquote> <p>One time my girlfriends grandma got scammed bad. (Keep in mind she is a very old lady and gets confused easily.) She received a phone call one day and the person on the other end claimed to be a lawyer. This person convinced her that her granddaughter (my girlfriend) had mistakenly been arrested in Mexico. (We are from Iowa.) The &ldquo;lawyer&rdquo; said she was in Mexico on a school field trip when she was arrested. He said that she was wrongfully arrested and that if she was bailed out he could get her on her way home. At first her grandma didn&rsquo;t believe any of it, but this scammer had done his research. He knew my girlfriends name. The grandma asked if she could talk to my girlfriend. At this point the &ldquo;lawyer&rdquo; handed the phone to a younger woman that claimed to be my girlfriend. This fake then proceeded to cry on the phone claiming to be my girlfriend and create false urgency. The grandma bought it and was instructed to wire them money. She did. All $4000 of it. I&rsquo;m assuming they got a lot of their information to set up the scam from Facebook. Yes this was reported to the police and no they weren&rsquo;t caught.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div>

11 people share about their worst experiences getting scammed. Trust nobody.

The Fyre Festival. Anna Delvey. The Trump presidency.We&#39;re living in a new golden age of famous scammers, but there are lesser-known scams creeping out of every corner of the internet. A recent Reddit thread had people confessing the times they fell for grifters and swindlersA scam could really happen to anybody, but that doesn&#39;t mean you can&#39;t scoff and feel superior.Pro tip: Don&rsquo;t go to an &quot;air traffic controller aptitude test&quot; you found on Craigslist.1. Hopefully ocean_wavez&#39;s IQ has improved since the Disney days. When I was 11 my favorite Disney Channel star tweeted a link to take an IQ test and see how your score compared to hers. A credit card number was needed to see the results, so I put in my parents&rsquo;. Of course she had been hacked and it was a scam, so I had to go sheepishly tell my parents I accidentally charged their credit card...they were not happy. 2. Don&#39;t worry, burnt-cookie&#39;s story has a happy ending. Candy. I bought $300+ tickets to see Knicks at MSG from Craigslist (dumb I know) that turned out to be fake. I got so pissed I walked into an nyc precinct and told them i want to file a complaint. The detective at the time said they&rsquo;re busting a lot of people in these fake ticket rings and we could bust him if we set up another sale. The next day I contacted the same guy from another number and we set up to meet him; the detective was dressed casually and I pretended to be his gf. He gave us the tickets by Dylan&rsquo;s Candy bar and was busted right there. It was fun. 3. You almost have to respect the hustle, orangey41. I was 19 and looking for jobs on Craigslist. Came across an ad for air traffic controller training. Take an aptitude test, and if you pass you&#39;ll be eligible for government-paid job training. The scam was actually brilliant. The test was in a hotel banquet room and cost $200 to take. You pay at the door, and are directed to wait in the room and not talk to anyone. They pass out an actual test, tell you to finish in as fast a time as you can, then leave. Before it starts they tell you that only the top 10% will be contacted for follow-up. There were about 100 of us taking the test. Easy $20,000 for the scammers. 4. The only way to make dougiebgood&#39;s story more 90s is if it ended with &quot;WAZZZZZUP.&quot; In the 90&#39;s my friend got all of these letters saying he was a part of a contest, and he just had to keep mailing letters in to enter the &quot;drawing.&quot; The wording they put in the later letters was something like &quot;You&#39;ve made it to the final round,&quot; and &quot;Congratulations, we are now prepared to write you a check for $10,000!&quot; All he had to do was call a 1-900 number that charged $2 a minute. It took him about 10 minutes to navigate the automated menus once they told him he was a winner and it ended with &quot;And you have won... (drum roll)... ONE DOLLAR!&quot; 5. Hysterical_Realist knows a good scammer when they see one. I&#39;ve had my debit card number stolen twice. Once I was charged for over $700 in women&#39;s shoes (I&#39;m not a woman.) Another time, just a couple of months ago, I had five different $100 transfers on Western Union, at different convenience stores in my city that I&#39;d never visited. But the funniest one was the one I actually fell for in person. A guy on the street in New Orleans told me: &quot;I bet you ten bucks I can tell you where you got your shoes.&quot; &quot;You&#39;re on&quot;, I said. &quot;OK. You got &#39;em right there. On your feet.&quot; I gave him the ten bucks out of pure admiration. 6. She could have been the one, elezraita!!! I met a girl on OKCupid who said she lived in New York City, but was planning a trip to Africa for a charity trip with her university. We talked for a while. She was cute and she claimed to like the same things I liked. She had weird English, though. Eventually, she went on her &ldquo;trip&rdquo;. When she got to Africa, we kept talking and eventually she told me a story about some terrible thing that had happened to her and she needed money. She tried to get me to send her $100. I had been suspicious for a while. Her English was often not like I would have expected from a native speaker from NYC. She made a lot of mistakes, but I just assumed that she was brought up in a home where English wasn&rsquo;t the first language, or spelling and grammar just weren&rsquo;t her thing. I actually asked her about it as diplomatically as I could, and she claimed to be a native English speaker. Also, I could never verify anything about her travel program or her family online. I did my research. There were other things, but I won&rsquo;t go into them. Asking me to send money to Africa via Western Union was the last straw. I noped out of that lickity split. Ghosted that filthy scammer completely. 7. &quot;Armitage&quot; sounds fashionable too, woke_trans_former. Got scammed by this guy selling &quot;Armani&quot; jackets in NYC from his car at 9PM on a Saturday. I happened to be in the market for these at the time, so I was very eager. He must have smelled a sucker. He slowed his car and asked me for directions to the Lincoln Tunnel. While I was looking that up on my phone, he gave his pitch about how he just came from an Armani show and had 2 extra jackets he couldn&#39;t fit in his luggage back to Italy. So I bought 2 jackets for $300 and thought I got a fantastic deal (they retail for more than $1000 each), all the way until I got to the train back to CT, when I noticed that the logo was not quite the Armani logo, but some other eagle logo. It also didn&#39;t say Armani, but Armitage. To be fair, he never said they were Armani jackets, only that he was coming from an Armani show. My 24-year-old-fresh-out-of-college dumbass brain filled in the non-existent gaps. The icing on the cake is that I actually had to withdraw cash from an ATM and I ended up overdrawing my account. 8. Hang this Met scam in the Louvre, h3llp0p. Best scam I&#39;ve ever witnessed: I was working a job at the Metropolitan Museum in New York for a week around the sculpture garden area. There was an old man I noticed towards the end of every day sketching one of the more prominent sculptures. It was a very detailed pencil sketch that was quite beautiful. Towards the close of day a group of people would gather around the man who was nearly finished with his art. I began to notice that he would show up at the same time every day and the same sketch was at the same point of completion - every day. Turns out he was selling his &quot;sketches&quot; for a couple hundred bucks a pop, but they were actually high-res copies that he would trace over for an hour or so before unloading them on a romantic tourist looking for an authentic piece of art. 9. Poor snoof123. Screw those popcorn bandits. My first job was working at a movie theater. I was at the concessions stand and 1 guy came up, he ordered like a soda and popcorn. He handed me a $50 bill and during the same time his friend walked up and started asking me a lot of questions about the menu and crap. They purposely distracted me very skillfully and managed to walk away with the $50 bill and the change... I felt like a total idiot. They probably have been doing that for a long time. 10. Always check the date, sortajamie. Bought football tickets outside the venue. Looked right, GA vs LSU and appropriate pics on the tickets. Tickets turned out to be two years old. 11. Damn, x3young3x&#39;s isn&#39;t funny, it&#39;s just elder abuse. One time my girlfriends grandma got scammed bad. (Keep in mind she is a very old lady and gets confused easily.) She received a phone call one day and the person on the other end claimed to be a lawyer. This person convinced her that her granddaughter (my girlfriend) had mistakenly been arrested in Mexico. (We are from Iowa.) The &ldquo;lawyer&rdquo; said she was in Mexico on a school field trip when she was arrested. He said that she was wrongfully arrested and that if she was bailed out he could get her on her way home. At first her grandma didn&rsquo;t believe any of it, but this scammer had done his research. He knew my girlfriends name. The grandma asked if she could talk to my girlfriend. At this point the &ldquo;lawyer&rdquo; handed the phone to a younger woman that claimed to be my girlfriend. This fake then proceeded to cry on the phone claiming to be my girlfriend and create false urgency. The grandma bought it and was instructed to wire them money. She did. All $4000 of it. I&rsquo;m assuming they got a lot of their information to set up the scam from Facebook. Yes this was reported to the police and no they weren&rsquo;t caught. 

The Fyre Festival. Anna Delvey. The Trump presidency.  We&#39;re living in a new golden age of famous scammers, but there are lesser-known scams creeping out of every corner of the internet. A recent Reddit thread had people confessing the...