got an email during university that I had been given access to an array of digital resources for free, all I had to do was link my university email credentials. Only after I had already done that did I realize how sketchy it was, but then it did actually turn out to be legit. Wish i remembered/still had access I remember there being some good stuff on there
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.
Oh yeah? I paid for WIndows Vista. I mean it eventually upgraded to 7, 8, and 10. But that was 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…
Had a lapse of judgement once and sent one of those 2FA passcodes sent to me via SMS to a shady guy on Craigslist. This was back when 2FA was still in the process of becoming ubiquitous, I do not believe I had seen one before that point.
I believe the only thing it allowed them to do was register a Google Talk number in my account’s name. I immediately dissociated my account from the number after this interaction (strangely, you could not actually cancel the number, only disown it, so I guess the scammer still got what they wanted anyway) and changed my account password for good measure.
I’ve also bought many bootleg collectors items off of Ebay. Though, each time I’ve done so was fully knowing the listings were lying, and still wanting the bootleg garbage anyway.
When I was a teen looking for a job, I checked the classified section of the newspaper. Saw a job post I thought I could do and called them. Ended up giving them some of my info, and maybe my social security number, don’t remember. All I know it I put them on hold to ask my parents a question about something, and they said “anybody can put things in the paper”. That’s when I learned that scammers just post their shit in public with little to no consequence.
I’ve never fallen for bad scams luckily but I fall for little ones sometimes. Like once I was entering the subway in a country where I didn’t speak the language and this guy coming the other way said the trains were cancelled, so I asked how do I get to X place, and he’s like “Oh, my friend has a taxi company, come with me and I’ll sort you out”. I was just about to follow him when I came back to my senses. Obviously there was nothing wrong with the trains and he was trying to fleece a tourist… or kidnap a woman, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Didn’t fall for it, but I got hit with an attempt at a pig butchering scam a week or so ago.
It was fun. They texted, I acted like I knew them, and I think that they eventually got frustrated because I kept agreeing that I remembered them very well, and that it wasn’t a ‘wrong number’, oopsie I sent a photo to the wrong person tee-hee.
The Earl Tablet.
What is that?
Exactly
It was this thing. Ages ago. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/camping/earl-rugged-revolutionary-tablet/
Online bartending school. I cancelled after 5 minutes of reflection.
Wanted to sell my ps4 cause I wanted something else, nearly fell for a scam on offerup.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I learned about Pump and Dump the hard way. 🤷♂️
Rough times when you’re forced to go at a sketchy gas station 😖
What is this? Breast milk when drinking alcohol??
It’s an old scam classically done with penny stocks and in modern times with crypto. Scammer buys up a whole bunch of garbage investments, cold calls a bunch of inexperienced investors and gets them to buy in (the pump), the price of the investment shoots up, and the scammer sells all their shares before the price collapses (the dump.)
It’s actually illegal, but people still get away with it.
This absolute bastard said he would give a rune platebody to the person that traded him the highest value item as a sign of trust… lost a DDP++ to that jerk.
Which sounds like a joke, but that was a real eye-opening experience for 8 year old me. Enough that 20+ years later I still reflect on it on an almost daily basis, to remind myself that if something seems like a bleedingly obvious scam it invariably is.
Lol when I was 15 or so I got way into competitive pokemon, and that eventually led to me breeding my own mons. Early on in my journey, I met some dude on Serebii chat that wanted to to do a 2 for 1 trade for my kingdra. He just sent over the pidgey and didn’t send over the other mon. I was really salty about that.
by the time gen four ended, I had bred a flawless Kingdra and (still to this day even) have all my .pkm files backed up on a hard drive somewhere.
Where would one go to look into backing up Pokemon?
…and if they’re backed up, why not Gen them? Haha
I guess it’s the satisfaction of knowing they’re truly legit.
Lol so the program I used was called HyperGTS. You could change the DSs target server, and you changed into to your routers IP, and then you could send stuff up to the GTS, at which case it would be saved into your PC. You could send it back the same way. I also have my .sav files. I might have gotten into the switch games if there was an easier way to transfer my old pokemon over.
The practice of cloning was (and I have to imagine, still is) pretty standard among breeders. Most competitive pokemon was (and again, still is) tool assisted: We made use of tools to check IVs, and to clone. The mons themselves were not altered. That was the point; no one cared if you were battling with hacked mons, as long as they were legal. There were still events that checked legitimacy, and those created a demand for legit mons. That being said, once RNG became standard issue, I just bred because I was playing in the pre RNG days and I liked them.
Is “Gen” the new pokesav?
Thanks for that! That’s some good stuff for me to look into.
Gen is just the word I saw people using for “generated Pokemon”. It was probably Pokesav, but obviously I’ve never gotten too deep into the scene, haha
When I was playing that game as a youngling, someone asked me to help get some wine from a cult temple. I did, which made the door slam shut and every cultist in the room attack me. I just barely made it out of there alive.
Then they told me to go get a second one. Yeah, they didn’t need wine, they wanted me to die to a trap so they could take my stuff without killing me.
I’m embarrassed to say I actually went to get that second wine.
I fell for the same thing back in the day. Probably where my trust issues began….
I don’t have trust issues, and I think that might actually be worse. Like, if that happened now, I’d only shirk at going in twice, but I’d still go in once.
I had a scam that netted me in no change in money whatsoever.
These scammers offer you this “you’ll rate these stuff on sites and we’ll give you money”, after completing a first batch and they give you some money, they’ll try to get the victim to believe they are legit. After believing that you’re trusting them enough, they pull the ponzi card “for next missions pay us 30-1000$ amount; you’ll recieve double after doing them”.
I got 30$ from them in total so I sent 30$ knowing it was a scam to see what they would do; of course they blocked me. I was expecting them to try to get more money out of me, appearently they’re satisfied with getting their bait back.
Curious what would have happened if you just stopped at $30 up (also remember, $ before the number; ¢ after)
Was the $30 paid into your account, or in the form of a check or something?
Imagine if it was check, and it bounced a week later and OP never realized, living his whole life thinking he didn’t get scammed.
Fucking herbalife. Not necessarily because I thought it was worth a damn, but to help a friend that thought it was worth a damn. I didn’t commit because I had this niggling doubt that it would be helping them to essentially waste good money to give them a “start” in something they were determined to try and make work.
Told them to let me think on it, and reckoned that backing a scam “business” in any way wouldn’t benefit them at all. Told them a polite version of that, and the number of people I already knew that had tried it and done nothing but get deeper in debt and more broke. Actually convinced them to cut their losses and move on, which was a surprise.
I’ve been fairly lucky about only running into scams either after I’d already heard about them, or when I wasn’t desperate enough to go for it despite the risks of how it was presented. The whole Nigerian Prince thing, as an example. The first time I ran across it, it seemed like a really bad idea, if it was legitimate at all, and I wasn’t desperate enough to risk anything for hope. It wasn’t long before it became known as a scam for sure, so the next time I got one of those emails, not only was I aware, but the second email would have shown or to be a scam what with being from an entirely different email address and not saying anything about following up.
Capitalism
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