I believe it must be mental illness that causes this.
In the future someone will see it.
There was another one who sold everything she had cause Harrison Ford needed money to come get her. Harrison effing Ford! Needed money. Good grief.
CNN just ran an article on this type of scam today - apparently it took in about $4 billion from Americans last year alone.
I can’t assume this is mere stupidity in all cases. Lots of people are very lonely and might grasp at any possibility for meaningful contact.
A relative of mine nearly fell for a similar scam, but thankfully balked when they began asking for money. This person isn’t a fool, but is older and not completely savvy about modern technology. Perhaps most important, they lost their spouse recently.
Put a few of those factors together, and I’m not surprised these scams work enough to keep people in business.
and, even scarier---- they serve on juries.
…with Keanu.
The difference is most of these scams are being run by imposters. In the maga scam it actually is the real Trump scamming money from his deluded followers.
I keep getting spam offering a 2024 MAGA hat. I never open them but I assume the only connection to Trump is the “MAGA” and he’ll never see any benefit.There have been MAGA storefronts in the past with nothing to do with Trump nor the RNC.
As long as it’s still written on the ceiling…
Bullshit. It was never in the dictionary.
I still don’t understand how ANYBODY could believe the IRS and US Government needs to collect your federal tax payments via iTunes gift cards.
Have you read any scams? Payment by gift card is the most plausible part. The lead-in stories are utterly insane.
We are missing the real important news in this thread.
John Wick 5 is being made!
Well, that’s one bright spot.
Keanu’s reaction:
I had a friend who used to do “casework” for a member of Congress, and she would routinely hear from victims of scams. Most of them didn’t even realize they were victims when they called – they were contacting the office because the scammers had dropped contact and they wanted assistance reaching out to them through an embassy, or to ask what kind of phone cards they should use to pay the “IRS.”
It’s easy to think of these people as stupid, buy many of them were otherwise intelligent, highly successful individuals. What they all had in common was some kind of vulnerability that a scammer could target – they were unhappy in their marriage, they were facing some difficulty in their business or careers, etc. These scammers were experts at detecting and exploiting that vulnerability to fan a sense of desperation that only the scammer could help alleviate.
There’s a difference between those kinds of IRS scams preying on people’s fears and ignorance about how the IRS operates, and someone thinking Keanu Reeves contacted them on Facebook and now they are secretly in a relationship.