There’s a spam thread that I’m sure is already deleted with some scam site where you get free gift cards or what have you. It made me wonder - what have you guys done that you were sure was either a load of hooey or an actual scam that turned out to be legit?
Not really an example of what I’m looking for, but the last time I was in Rome we were all standing in the enormous line for the Vatican Museum/Sistene Chapel, and my mother to my great indignation accepted the offer of this guy who was running down the line looking for English speakers to get together a tour group. I mean, seriously, the guide books all say not to buy into that shit!
It was an art history major from Savannah, Georgia who had strategic line holders all up and down the line, got us in in fifteen minutes, gave a really great tour believe it or not… and when we saw the rest of the line we realized that we wouldn’t have gotten in at all in the two hours before they closed for the day. So my mom has never let me live it down.
Also there’s the whole “metal soap-shaped thing” to take garlic smell off your hands - you don’t need that, actually, you can just use a knife (it’s the metal that does it) but it does actually work.
I guess the closest I can come to that is the guy who rang our doorbell, saying he was selling frozen foods and would we like to try some. Thinking back, I am not sure why didn’t send him off with a flea in his ear. At any rate we did try a box of something (generally, he sells boxes that contain a dozen portions). It wasn’t cheap, but the meat, fish, etc. was wonderful. That was probably about ten years ago. He comes round every month or two. He himself has changed suppliers twice and once gave us full credit for a batch of chicken that was not up to the usual standard (it was too salty and I suspect that it had been reprocessed in some way). Looking back, I am still amazed that we tried it.
At the risk of shilling: restaurant.com. It’s a pretty old site by internet standards, and one of those “sounds too good to be true” deals, but I’ve been using it for years now with no catch. It really is as it says - buy a gift certificate to a restaurant for less than face value. Use the certificate at the restaurant for face value. I wait until they’ve got special deals, and at least once a month, it seems, they offer $25 gift certificates for $2.
There’s a little fine print (you generally have to ring up a minimum tab, alcohol doesn’t count, some places won’t take them on holidays), but overall it’s a really super deal, and it’s helped us to discover some real gems in our neighborhood we’d never otherwise be able to justify spending that kind of money on. (Which, of course, is why restaurants sign up for their site!)
There’s a service called Rewards Gold - I filled out some surveys, and they subscribed me to a bunch of magazines / newspapers for free - Playboy, Maxim, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and… something else. They offered more options, but they were all for mags I found not worth the trouble.
I was going along assuming it would be an endless chain of “Click here, fill this out,” but it was straightforward and pretty easy.
I was coming in to say this. We pick up a bunch of these when they have their $2 sales, and we get $25 off a meal at a pretty nice restaurant. Yeah, you can’t go on holidays and you need to spend at least $40 or whatever the official minimum is, but we did the math and it comes out to a pretty decent savings.
Too good to be true frequent flyer miles offers. I signed up for a Citibank AAdvantage a few months ago to get 40,000 frequent flyer miles for spending something like a thousand dollars on it over the first few months. I just charged regular stuff on it and paid it off and got the points. Then, they gave me an American Express card for free. Same deal. Put some stuff on it and pay it off and you get many more points. I ended up with over 70,000 points in just a few months.
I still wasn’t convinced that I could actually do anything with them because American Airlines is going through bankruptcy but I checked to see what the absolute best thing I could do with them would be. It turns out that they will flew me to Hawaii for 35,000 points. I am going this week. My little brother lives there and has a car for me to use. Priceline had a great deal on a decent hotel for $80 a night so I took that too. Total upfront cost for a 10,000 mile Boston to Hawaii trip for a week = $410 thanks to those kind people. I still have enough frequent flyer points left to go anywhere in the U.S. another time.
I had a legal situation that seemed to have no hope whatsoever with me administering it. I turned it over to an eager attorney and let it go for over a year. I was pleasantly surprised to pick up a huge settlement check.
Around 12 years ago, I heard of this company that would, for a small monthly fee, let you rent as many DVDs as you wanted for as long as you wanted with no late fees and no need to drive to the store. They sent you the discs by mail and you returned them the same way. Impossible! I thought. How could they make money? The monthly fee was less than I typically paid in late fees at Blockbuster for one or two rentals.
My roommates and I decided to try them out–we were all skeptical and wanted to do a test subscription. We expected that there would be a limited selection of available movies, long delays in receiving what we requested, and/or problems with damaged or missing DVDs that would require additional fees to cover. They had to cover their expenses some way after all–how could this service from a rinky-dink company possibly work?
We were pleasantly surprised that, not only did we not have any of the anticipated problems, the service exceeded expectations in every category: more movies, no delays, and the company accepted all responsibility for losses. Heck, sometimes if we returned a movie early in the morning, we would get a new one in the mail that evening.
With that experience under our belt, we evangelized the service to everyone we knew. The early Netflix appeared to many people as a dodgy service that was too good to be true.