You know what, after steaming about this for a while. The user name is FISHBICYCLE
Huh. I was driving down Sunset once when a guy in a pick-up with big boxes in back driving next to me started yelling at me about speakers or something. I thought he was crazy, but in any case, I had to make a right turn, and never saw him again. Now I realize he was trying to sell me speakers. What’s the scam behind that? Are they empty boxes?
Same thing happened to me. I had actually gotten some subscriptions a couple of years earlier the same way, this time cute college age blonde girl convinced me to do it again. Never got diddly. Now if they try this again (I live where there are a number of college students) I’ll politely but firmly point out how someone else ruined it for them, and close the door.
In my wildly naive youth, I paid $200 to a employment service who would try to hook you up with a job (I was in between at the time). After about a week they got me a position at a rent-to-own place (as I said I was ignorant about just how borderline unethical such places are), but they didn’t have me do anything, I just sat around for a day in the back. At the end of the day they said that it turned out they had no position for me at all, and let me go. I went back to the employment service the next day and complained (I was only liable for the $200 when they got me a job, even if it was just for that one day), but I was screwed because I had signed the form with all the fine print and had no legal recourse. Bitches.
No, but neither are they the high end models he professes them to be. They say they’re making a delivery for some upscale audio place and that someone there screwed up the order and included two too many. He’s upset with the store or just had no scruples (I can’t remember which) and although these normally go for a grand each (or whatever) he’ll sell them for a huge discount but he’s got to get back to the store quickly.
I wasn’t going to buy something “stolen” but totally believed his story. Then, while recounting the event to a friend later that day learned that it was a scam and the speakers apparently are complete crap. He had me fooled. I totally believed the guy. Apparently this scam was pretty widespread. I think it was near twenty years ago that it happened to me.
Now that I think back the bartender might have doubled as sidewalk tout; it was around 15 years ago and I don’t remember distinctly. I was looking for a place to grab something to drink anyhow, so I didn’t need much convincing.
Really? He always seemed like a very professional and well informed poster re his areas of expertise.
That’s my impression too. I know fishbicycle was taking some time off the board to work on some music projects so I wonder if it’s not just a case of either miscommunication or of him simply being unreachable at the moment. My sense is he’s a very stand-up guy.
My very first buy on E-bay, from a seller with only a 95 % satisfaction rate. I now know that is WAY low.
Hoever, I bought a small necklace for ten dollars. Shipping and handling should have been, reasonably, about 15 bucks. Turns out I didn’t read the small print abd this company charges 60 bucks for S&H. I should have walked away, as I had only two feedbacks at the time, but I suffered in silence and considered it learning money.
I was a young teen at a county fair. At a booth called “Balloon Darts” they had some plush animals I wanted to get for my girl. You paid a dollar to get some darts, then threw them at the board covered with balloons. The idea was that if a balloon popped, you got a point, and with enough points, you won a toy.
So I started throwing darts, figuring there was a gimmick somewhere (there always is), but it didn’t dawn on me what it was. I thought perhaps the balloons were tough or mounted somehow so you couldn’t break them, but I hit one almost every time and when I didn’t, the stall manager said, “I’ll give you that one anyway.”
Then I realized that it was a different kind of scam. I was just buying the toys and the darts/balloons were only a distraction. I’m sure that if I purchased the right number of darts, he would have sold me the plush toy marked with that number of points, but I was too chicken to ask.
Probably. My husband and I give money to hard-luck story people sometimes when we can, and if it’s not a flamingly obvious lie. I’m sure some (most?) of them are scam artists. I guess we’re easy marks.
I didn’t get scammed by the magazine sale door-to-door guys, but when I said, politely, no thank you and I was actually busy, he wrote obscenities and threats all over my apartment door. Nice. I was pretty shaken up, in fact. Some of that stuff was … wow.
I was a pre-teen, probably, at a county fair. The game was “Shoot the Star” in which you try to shoot a red star completely out of a square paper target with a bb gun. “A prize is guaranteed!” crowed the man in the cowboy hat. After failing to shoot the star out of the target, the man removed the target from the line on which it hung, handed it to me, and said “here’s your prize!” Not a bad lesson to learn for a boy at a county fair. I used to go to those things every year.
Yes. Then they sold you the bag of oregano, hey? 
I’ve had a few scam attempts put on me but through a combination of good will and natural suspicion, I’ve avoided being taken in, most recently by an eBay bidder with zero feedback in the last 2 years suddenly buying an expensive piece electronic equipment I’d listed for sale (a used DLP projector) at the “Buy It Now” price, asking it to be shipped to her new address (not the one listed on eBay because she’d moved since setting up her eBay account)… in the Ukraine… And she could only pay by Western Union.
The first real scam I was approached with was the most elaborate, and also the most memorable because it was the only one I experienced in person rather than over the phone or the Internet. It was also the closest call I’ve had to being really scammed (though I suppose by definition, it’s possible I’ve been successfully scammed and have yet to realize it).
While a college student back in 1990, I was on my way home from a summer job I had in Midtown Manhattan when I was approached by a man with an apparently severe motor or mental impairment, gesturing for me to help him. Iin addition to speaking haltingly, with both a stutter AND a lisp, he walked jerkily and grinned like an idiot. He showed me what looked like some ancient Roman coins in an envelope with someone’s name and address on it on Park Avenue in the East 70s (a very tony address), and a flyer with the same name and a phone number on it stating there was a reward for its return. He managed to convey the idea that he was trying to talk to this guy on the phone (he was next to a pay phone) and not succeeding, and handed me the receiver. The man on the other end was relieved to talk to me (“I didn’t know what that guy was saying, I thought it was some kind of prank call, he’s called me a few times and I hung up on him”).
The story was that these were coins from the man’s personal collection, and he dropped it accidentally on the street while taking it and others like it home from a safety deposit box at a nearby bank. He was relieved and excited that they were recovered. There were reward posters put up around the area. This “retarded fellow” must have found it and had called him a few times, but he’d hung up on him each time because he didn’t know what he was saying. “I’d much rather deal with you, frankly.”
The reward amount (not printed on the poster) was $1,000, and the “retarded fellow” was evidently expecting something on the order of $100 or $200 (based on what he managed to convey from his earlier phone calls before getting hung up on). The man on the phone suggested I give some kind of reward out of my pocket to the retarded fellow to get the coins from him and then bring the coins to his apartment on the Upper East Side, where he’d give me the full reward.
You see where this is going, right? Of course you do. That’s why they were targeting a young, well-dressed (the job I had was at an office with a dress code requiring dress pants, a shirt and tie) and naive-looking kid.
I definitely had bad feelings about giving anybody $100 of my own money, being as I didn’t have much more than that in my bank account available for withdrawal. On the other hand, the possibility of a windfall reward was very attractive to me for exactly that reason.
Sensing my hesitation, the guy on the phone suggested “maybe he’d take $50.” Which I guess I could swing for a $950 profit, right?
What really saved me from the scam in the end was my sense of fair play: I refused to shaft the “retarded fellow” from his fair share of such a windfall. Yet I didn’t have $500 to my name. The man on the phone kept saying “I’m sure he’d be happy with $50 or $100 and he’ll never know”, but I would have nothing to do with it.
Instead, I turned the tables on him: I proposed that I would come to his apartment, which was a walking distance away (about 20 minutes), and get the reward money from him first, leaving something of mine in his keeping as a bond (my driver’s license). I’d come back and give the “retarded guy” his $500, get the coins, and bring them to him to get my license back. Everybody’s happy, right? 'Cause we’re all honest people here?
The man on the phone hesitated, then agreed to this deal.
I took the 20-minute walk to the address I copied down from the reward poster. It was a doctor’s office, whose office was closed. I noted the name and number on the board outside and called from a pay phone, and got the doctor’s answering service. I informed them that the doctor’s name and number were being used as part of a scam and got a properly surprised and grateful response.
Then I went home about 45 minutes later than usual and have not mentioned this incident to anybody ever, until now.
Twenty years ago, I lent five hundred bucks to the brother of a guy I worked with. I think that the co-worker was a fairly well functioning meth addict; his brother was worse. He lived in a bus, had nothing but bad to say about the people around him and made a living by quick deals (At one time his bus was full of upholstery leather because he got it for a song.)
Anyway, he asked to borrow five hundred bucks, with his truck as collateral. Of course, he never repaid, but he did give me the truck. Of course, the truck didn’t run, but after rebuilding the carb and replacing the battery, I was able to sell it for the original five hundred bucks.
Robardin, a variation on that scam (where you split the reward money before getting the reward) was played rather well in the Nicholas Cage movie Matchstick Men. In that version, a winning lottery ticket was “found” by two people, one of whom was the scammer and claimed to be underage, therefore unable to collect herself. Of course, the ticket was phony.
I got scammed in New Delhi. It was my second trip to Delhi. The first time I left Delhi, I had a hell of a time changing money at the airport. If I remember correctly, you can only change rupees in India, so I didn’t want to take any money out of the country. Changing money at the airport was terrible, crowded, pushing, no lines. Of course, I was 5’7” and about 200 lbs (at the time) so once I finally got into the spirit of the elbowing and the pushing, I was able to knock around the short, wiry guys in line.
Anyway, pushing and shoving in the money exchange line was a pretty miserable experience. On my SECOND trip to Delhi, I planned it out so I didn’t have any extra rupees by the time I got to the airport. I had just enough to tip the driver. I figured I’d go hang out in the business class lounge, drink free cokes and wait for my flight.
The hotel arranged a car to the airport. At this point, I screwed up and didn’t specify WHICH airport. I didn’t realize that Delhi had an international and a domestic terminal. As a foreigner, the car driver took me to the international terminal. But, I was actually flying domestic – I had a connecting flight in Mumbai on Air India.
I had been in Delhi for 4 weeks and hadn’t had much trouble getting around. All of a sudden, I couldn’t find anyone who spoke English (at all!) or could help me get from the international to the domestic terminal (my driver was long gone, of course). Luckily, I am a big believer in allowing a lot of extra time at the airport, but I still needed to quickly get over to the right terminal.
All I had on me was 15.00 dollars American. I finally found a guy who said he would drive me to the domestic terminal for 5.00 (which is what I told him I had). He loaded up my stuff in the back of his car, and drove me to the terminal (in my memory, it was very close, maybe 5 minutes? My memory could be faulty though). We get to the terminal, get out of the car, walk around to the closed back of the car. He says he won’t give me my bags unless I give him more money. It was pretty tense and scary. I gave him my last 10.00 and he gave me my bags. I honestly don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had that 10.00 or if he had decided that 15.00 (total) wasn’t enough. 15.00 USD was a HUGE amount of money for the ride though, just astronomical. We had a driver for an entire day on a trip to the Taj Majal and it cost about 25.00 (IIRC).
I have one similar to Glory.
We were in Honduras last October, and were at the ferry to take us over to the islands. The ATM was not working, and they wouldn’t take a Mastercard, so we had to find a cab to take us back into the town and use an ATM. It’s about a 5 minute drive each way.
We find a cab and haggle a price (which is normal) of about 100 Lempira in our very poor Spanish. He drives us to the ATM and I take out 2500 Lempira for the next week or so, just in case. I get back into the cab and he is on his cell phone. I can understand a lot of Spanish, but I have trouble speaking it. He’s telling someone that he knows we just picked up a lot of money, we can’t speak Spanish, and how much should I get from them?
Along the road back he starts saying that the trip was an ‘express’ trip and that it would cost much more then the original deal. I kept refusing, and he pulled over. He insisted that the trip would now cost $1000 Lempira! We were in a big rush, in a bad industrial neighborhood, and he had our bags in the trunk. We finally agreed on $700 Lempira, which we gave him when we got to the terminal, after we got our bags.
We were so upset. It’s not a ton of money in the big picture ($46 Canadian), but it sucked to get taken advantage of like that.
Just this past week I was shopping at the Starfish Market in St. John, USVI. An adult woman was sitting at a booth. When we passed, she asked if I wanted to buy a raffle ticket for some school. I’m a sucker for these things. I gave her $10 and told her not to bother putting my name on it because I was leaving soon. (I considered it a donation.)
As we walked away, my friend said, “You know there’s no school, right?”
Yeah, some time soon after that I found/read a pamphlet distributed by the NYPD about commonly run street scams, this was one of them.
I was sure I was being scammed once. One time this guy with a foreign accent and seeming to be on some sort of substance asked me how to make a collect call and I told him the best way was to dial one of those 1800 numbers that were the rage in the late 90s early 2000s (dont know if they’re still around or not.) He seemed confused about the affair and I couldnt tell why because he seemed to be from Australia from the accent and didnt have trouble understanding me, until I figured he was drunk or high or something.
Then he asked me to dial that number and my scam o meter shot up and I was just waiting for him to ask me for some personal information. But I did anyway after I verified that it did not involve revelation of personal information.
Perhaps he was faking being intoxicated and was trying to scam me but never found a way to work it in the conversation. naaaaah, they are way to insistent. Like the probable meth head who accosted me while filling up my gas giving me the old out of gas or car broke down story: she had that Miami, breezy and curvy yet coked out look to her and when I said no and ignored her while continuing to pump she continued to stand next to me and after a few seconds said “…so are you gonna help me?” Ummm, sorry, no.
As a cop I have never seen anyone fall for the classic Nigerian sceme but I have seen variations work. For example: You sell your car on eBay or Craigslist. Someone from England contacts you and says they love the car, can’t get one like that here, I’ll pay the full asking price. Buyer sends a certified bank check for the full ammount. He also sends a few thousand more. Buyer requests that you send the difference to someone acting as his agent who will ship the car for him. Maybe there is a little extra in there for your trouble. Eventually the check will bounce and are out the money you sent to the shipping agent.