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.
Something similar to this happened to me but I think it was for CSGO. The steam sign in page was a fake popup window inside the main website, draggable and all. I realized it was fake when I noticed it was light theme while my computer was dark theme.
Edit: I realized it was fake before I signed in, luckily
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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feel free! if anything comes from it, I’d be interested in seeing it
A buddy of mine got her Discord account hacked by someone doing this. They gave her another Discord user who was playing as an employee. To “prove” the account was hers she had to change the validated email to something they sent. She mentioned something about it and then I and another person in IT started freaking out.
All in all it was fine and she got her account back. I think she was just embarrassed. I think it’s the first time she’s ever had someone try to do something like that. Me and the other person who caught it were trying to reassure her that we noticed it because we’ve had to do so many IT trainings and phishing tests over the years.for work.
yeah, the second they said something about reporting me by accident and steam banning my IP I knew it was a scammer. Although I suspected it before, as I never had a random person message in in 20 years of using steam.
I had hoped to lure the scammer a little bit further and figure out what they wanted to do, but I got too excited and scared them. very sad
They were almost certainly going to tell you that if you didn’t act then both of you would get banned then direct you to a fake Steam employee or fake website. It’s interesting they randomly messaged you. Normally this relies on being done to friends.
I have basically the same story, except it was one of my actual friends on Steam asking me to rate their CS:GO team. I fell for it since I was trying to be nice, and luckily changed my password before they could turn around and use my account for the same thing.
I fell for these but they offered free csgo skins or knives instead. Steam support got my back with that.
I haven’t changed my Steam password since I got an account many, many, many years ago. No idea what it is anymore—something really short and basic—but other people do. I get two-factor hits all the time 🤣
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.
Can you link the podcast?
That’s the website, but it’s not rendering for me for some reason.
Here’s a PocketCast link:
Look up “pig butchering” by John Oliver. Yes, this is the technical term for it.
The podcast goes much more in depth than Oliver did. But they’re both good content.
Not the one you asked for, but another interesting episode on the topic: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/141/
Aww.
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.
That’s pretty expensive for the age, but cheap overall. I was in a similar situation with my coworker at the same age, but it was luckily about an order of magnitude smaller a loan. I mentioned it to my family and they sat me down to explain that I’d inadvertently given both of us a gift, just mine was in the form of experience.
I got lucky with that. I’d loaned a coworker money multiple times and he paid me back every time, sometimes with interest.
I guess I was cheaper than the payday loan places.
I still lend people money, I just don’t expect it back, and then it’s a nice surprise
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.
Anyone can call from any number? Surely it’s not easy to spoof numbers.
It’s supposed to be getting better, but moving very slowly.
spoofing is pretty common still afaik.
How do you even spoof numbers? just say “oh my number is 1234 not 5678 ignore that is from 5678”
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 😆
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.
An assumption on my part.
I’ll argue that not everyone begging for coins is scamming though some probably are. Trying to figure out which is just a recipie for misery.
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.
Train tickets near me have a variable cost depending on how far you’re going, but the bus costs about 1/4 or 1/5 of minimum wage per hour…lol
That’s a much more costly train ticket than I was imagining.
I was assuming something like the inverse of that: a quarter of an hour of minimum wage.
That does tip the scale back to scammy.
Person you responded to was not the original poster. Not sure why they’ve felt the need to inject extra information that is entirely unrelated to the comment you replied to. Seems pretty scammy to me
I guess I just got scammed.
I fell for this one in college. At the time I felt really stupid, but it was less than $20 and that guy probably needed it more than I did.
This happened to me in a Walmart parking lot with a guy telling me a sob story about how he’s traveling with his family and out of gas (with a gas can in his hand). I didn’t give him any money but saw him there in the parking lot a couple weeks later and he gave the same story obviously not recognizing me from before.
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.
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…
Oh yeah? I paid for WIndows Vista. I mean it eventually upgraded to 7, 8, and 10. But that was it…
Years ago, I bought headphones that were ¼ of the price of the big name Bose and Sony’s and provided at least ¾ the experience. When I wore them so much they eventually broke years later, I purchased some more from their website. Turns out they have been taking orders and haven’t been delivering products. Their Facebook page still posts ads and the comments are people talking about how it was a scam. That’s $170 dollars I won’t get back. It’s weird because I really liked their product and had no reason to think they would suddenly stop delivering. Very strange.
Brand is Cowin, by the way.
You can contest that sort of thing with your bank if you are quick about it. Probably too late now, but I had something similar happen and that’s how I resolved it. In my case, the rumor was the owner of the website had died
Yeah I wasn’t fast enough and I also tried to contact their support and such. Oh well
I believe this company used to sell MP3 players about 20 years ago. I had several and they were all actually pretty decent products at the time. if its the same company I am rather sad that it may have devolved into some sort of scam.
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I think it is possible the guys sold you the decoy model.
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Oh man, you got in the van with them and were taken to a second location?
You are lucky you actually got speakers
This is the bigger story than the speakers! Lmao
Not only that, but driven there for the specific purpose of putting your card into an ATM and entering the pin.
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 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.
Or any other kind of pyramid scheme, really
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?
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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).
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.
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.
Fun fact: MLMs cannot be made illegal because they’re a quintessential expression of pure capitalism.
What about making your country not pure capitalism
Literally communism.
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.
2 scams in 1 day, not bad.
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 remember seeing one of those and thinking about how overpriced everything was. It didn’t seem high quality, and even if it was, I don’t think I’d have wanted to pay anywhere near those prices.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I used to help people apply, and it was hellacious when there was animosity from one parent due to a divorce. It could really fuck things up for the poor kids.
