How does the steak truck scam work?

All I know is I’m not about to buy steaks from some dude with a cooler in the back of his pickup who hits me up while we’re both pumping gas.

…but they have to sell it or the boss will deduct it from their wages! May as well reduce the price then or it will just spoil!

Exactly.

A more recent version of that is the guy who was selling flat screen TVs that were actually see-through oven doors.

There was a variation of this done for years. A meat supplier would advertise in local papers, and rent a suite in a local hotel-they would take your order, and yo would wind up paying far above market price for a whole lot of low quality meant. Nothing illegal about, and who really has a home freezer than can hold 300 pounds of meat?
I talked with a guy who got taken in by it-most of the meat was dogfood quality.

I’m frankly shocked that anyone would buy any meat from some dude in a truck, and then actually eat it. If someone handed me a huge prime dry-aged ribeye or filet mignon of the back of a truck for free, and was somehow able to prove its authenticity, it would still go directly into the garbage.

I’ve seen this scam before, and they are always in a legitimate refrigerated meat truck.

But keep in mind there are still five grades of meat BELOW select. So maybe a factory bought a carcass to grind up for canned chili or something, but the guy running the factory figures he can pull off the filets and sell them from the back of a truck. Again, these lower cuts are often of such low quality that stores don’t even want to stock them, but they’re legal to sell to the public.

And I’m not saying that selling below-Select cuts is the only way this scam works, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t a good chunk of that market.

Yes, here too. And they were frozen anyway. (And with no dates on them, they could have been frozen for years.)

Don’t be so sure it wasn’t stolen in some other way, though. Just last month, these guys stole 5 tons of watermelons. :slight_smile:

I’m not making it up; some guy in a kind of junky pickup with some magnetic decal on the door like 'Beefmasters Steak Co." or something like that, and one of those big durable coolers like they keep dry ice in at grocery stores in the bed started hitting me up to buy steaks while we were both pumping gas- he was on the opposite side of the pump from me.

It seemed really sketchy- something about having a quota, and losing his job selling these steaks, and selling them at cost to meet the quota, etc… even if it had actually been USDA Prime like he claimed.

I had an easy out- I had been visiting my parents in Houston and had a 4-5 hour trip to Dallas ahead of me with no cooler.

My local grocery store occasionally sells whole beef tenderloins $6 a pound. IIRC there was no USDA grade on it, so I’d guess Select at best. (I bought one and it made a pretty decent roast.)

If someone bought wholesale lower-grade tenderloins at $5 a pound, sliced it into [del]6 oz[/del] 5 oz fillets, and sold a box of 8 for $20, they’d make a quick $8.25.

I understand that someone could attempt a one-off short con of that nature. But it’s unlikely to work out. Unless the scammer is a butcher then it costs the same to butcher meat no matter what the grade, so the scammer is going to pay a relatively high cost for getting meat ready to sell. In addition, he can’t sell his meat at $15 a pound. The very most he’ll get is half of the grocery store price. People won’t buy meat off a truck because it’s convenient, they’ll do it if they’re stupid, and think they’re getting a bargain. So at best they’re going to get $10 for that box of meat, and their markup will be less than 50%. Scammers won’t work on that basis, they know they need at least 100% markup, and even that isn’t much. And since there’s no guarantee they’ll sell all that meat they may not make anything at all, or lose money. It’s just not a practical scam. Look at the speakers sold from the back of a truck - those $200 dollar speakers being sold for $100 didn’t cost them $50 a piece. They probably paid $10 apiece for them, or less.

Or, for that matter, anything else.

Obligatory Simpsons reference.

The variation I saw recently in my 'hood was a woman with a pickup who told me “I’ve been making meat deliveries in the neighborhood and have an extra case of steaks if you’re interested.” Right.

I have never run into the meat sellers, but the speaker sellers are working for legitimate businesses. Their business model is “Import cheap speakers and sell them through a fleet of salesmen who drive vans and pretend to be dumping stolen goods”. They also sell them on craigslist and other internet outlets now. The speakers aren’t stolen and the salesmen aren’t ripping off their bosses. Several years ago I ran into one of them and told him that I would buy the speakers if he would simply admit that his story was false. He wouldn’t do it. Their business is dependent on people believing that they are getting quality stolen merchandise. If he admitted that they were just cheap crap it would ruin the illusion. [He also may have suspected that I was a cop, as I am often mistaken for one.]

I have also been approached by the driver of a furniture truck who used the same tactics as the speaker guys. I called our local police (there is a bylaw that prohibits soliciting without a permit). The cops informed me that the truck driver had secured a permit and had listed a company in Thomasville, NC as his employer. In this case there is an added element in that they are misrepresenting themselves as selling Thomasville furniture when what they are really doing is selling cheap furniture in a truck that says “Thomasville” (the town, not the furniture company) on the side.

They showed this scam on a TV programme over here. They rented a small refrigerated truck and stuck some magnetic signs on the sides to make it look authentic.

They parked in a residential Street and knocked on people’s doors carrying one of those polystyrene insulating boxes they use in the trade. Inside the box were genuine prime cuts of meat, and they explained that he’d had a delivery refused, but they had to go and make a collection so the truck needed to be empty.

The householders looked closely and suspiciously at the meat in the box, and then, when they heard the price, felt themselves unable to refuse. The guy then took the sample box back to the truck and returned with an identical sealed one. By the time the householders discovered what They’d bought, the truck was long gone.

They actually did this for the TV programme, and convinced at least for householders to by the rubbish meat. none of the householders said that they would have reported it to the police because they felt too embarrassed at being caught out.

Here is a thread I started with a similar experience with 63 posts in response. You might find it helpful.

I had that exact thing happen to me a couple of days ago, but the guy was in a van marked up with the name and phone number of some meat supplier. The vehicle looked like something a real business would use. I was sitting on my porch and the guy yelled out that he had meat left over from his deliveries. WTF, does that actually work?

And here is mine about the speakers in the van from 2005.

Months ago a guy came by our house trying to sign us up for a steak delivery program. He had a small cooler - the kind you’d carry a picnic out to the beach with - mostly full of meat to show people what they would be getting every couple weeks.

I’m not about to buy meat from strangers, but I did glance at his brochure, and the subscription price was pretty damn high. When I told him no, no matter, now there was a new con - my house was the last one on his route for the day and he wanted to sell me the cooler full of meat at a substantial discount. Why yes, I’d love to buy this meat submerged in lukewarm water, that you’ve been pulling out and showing to people all day!

Another guy tried to sell us what was effectively a bottle of Pine-Sol for $40. Why are all the door-to-door sales so shitty?