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Have you ever fallen for a scam?

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I got scammed out of $70, won a PSP auction on eBay and sent a money order to the guy and he never shipped it :/

I was young and stupid , the main thing is eBay is for the buyers now so I would have got a refund had I used PayPal but growing up I never set one up

Basterd


I was so close to doing those Colombia 10¢ CD things, got lazy and never mailed it in lol
 
Yes, I purchased a steam key on Ebay but the fucking twat redeemed the code before sending it to me and tried to claim I was scamming him first. Such an asshole!
 
@B.K.

Explain, please? What happened?


Anyway, to change the tone of this post I'll write how I saved a person from being scammed. Used to work at the post office, a kid came in--he was about 17 at the time--with a laptop he wanted to mail. I remember seeing the receiving country as Nigeria, which made me suspicious because I was aware of 419 scams. I ended up asking the kid why he was selling it, if he knew the person, and so forth. Turns out it was definitely a scam, told the kid to be more careful. Saved him his laptop that day.
 
Once when I young. Long story short got an IM on MSN messenger from a friend, clicked the link and gave my user name and password to some website, only to realize what a dumb ass I was a few hours later when people told me they were getting those same IMs from me that I didn't send. Changed my password and out of paranoia I eventually even made a new account. Luckily I was young and my Hotmail account didn't contain anything more important then some stuff from a few video game sites.

After that that I am always cautious of giving out info to anyone sometime bordering on paranoia.
 
Back in the early days of the Internet I got on one of those pyramid chain letter schemes where you send like a dollar to each of the top 5, remove #1, add yourself to the bottom, and pass it on. Though 11 year old me was a fucking boss who realized there was no way to enforce the dollar thing.

Also, nobody ever sent me a dollar.
 
I was living in Hong Kong when the Beijing Olympics were on and my mum decided to come and visit me and see the horse riding events at the same time - they were held in Hong Kong. As you can probably guess, the tickets she bought were a scam - couple of weird things though.

1. The internet site she bought them from were actually recommended to her by the local travel agent. The problem was that she didn't want to buy a package deal as she would be staying with me and so the travel agent couldn't sell her anything, but found the website.

2. My mum got a bit worried about the tickets not arriving, so she emailed the company and got a reply that they were in the post. That was what actually annoyed me, as the scam wasn't directly scamming my mum, but this was a direct lie.

Anyway, she still came to Hong Kong and a friend hooked her up with tickets for a couple of events, so it all worked out.
 
Sibersk Esto said:
So today I got a call from an Indian guy claiming to be a technician from Microsoft, claiming he had received multiple error messages from my computer and that hackers had most likely taken control of it. It wasn't hard to believe him; my (old) computer had been slow for awhile and it wasn't far fetched that someone had hacked it. So he does all this trickery with cmd showing me how infected my computer supposedly was, that my CPU usage was fluctuating all that shit. Needless to say I fell for the guy hook line and sinker and ended up giving him card information to "fix" the issue. However, just to be safe I did an internet search only to find out this exact spiel was a common internet scam for many people. Shit, microsoft doesn't even call people (which I learned after I called THEM). I didn't waste any time in getting the card cancelled for a new one and I'm going to dispute the bill, plus I haven't used the computer they supposedly fixed since until I could call a technician to give it a look over. So I ask Gaf, have you ever fallen for a scam?
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Watch this brilliant video on this exact scam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjKjyMKj3n4&list=UUD6MWz4A61JaeGrvyoYl-rQ
 
Last time someone called my house telling me my PC was infected was put on hold for a good half an hour. When I spoke again I just told him that to F*** off with the scam and he's never called again. My friend did get scammed though for five hundred dollars. Someone from the "IRS" called telling him he owed them money and I'm guessing the fear caught the better of him since he went and got a prepaid card to pay. Needless to say once he told me what was going on I did a little digging to find out that scam has been going around lately.
 
i bought a chess set when i was 14. i sent a money order.
i would look outside the window whenever i heard something resembling a truck's engine.
it never came.
 
I almost stumbled into the 'cheap stereos out of a van cuz we just have too many of these things!' scam in college but I literally had no money (well, maybe $100), and I got a bad vibe when they basically asked me much money I could give them lol.

that video above with the dummy pc is great. only watched a few minutes so far.
 
I didn't but some guy in my class bought a 25$ gift card off a homeless guy for $15 and it turned out to be empty. He later realized that "maybe that's why he walked away so quickly."
 
Back when I was young and naive, someone e-mailed me about an Ebay auction for an artbook I had failed to win, saying that they would sell me the same artbook at the same price. Obviously, only after I sent the money order did I realize that they had no real obligation to send me the item. I regard it as $80 well spent, though, as I never came close to falling for any scams since then.
 
In 2000, I got ripped off (with around a dozen other people) for a Yahoo auction for a Sega Dreamcast.

I think that's about it.
 
I posted my PS3 on craiglist a few years ago and was emailed by a guy in Colorado. He said he ould purchase it and cover the shipping and get back to me with details.

The following day I get an email from him saying that the PS3 was for his son that was studying medicine in Nigeria and wanted to get it to him asap for his son's birthday. He told me he sent me an extra $100 dollars to cover the shipping, and provided me with the Nigerian address to send it to.

Shortly after, I get an email from an email that said it was PayPal, saying that I had $350 waiting to be transferred to my account, but it would only transfer once the sender had confirmed that he had received a tracking number for the package. I had literally just set up my PayPal, so I didn't know how transactions worked.

The guy sent me another email saying that I had to send it asap and he was going to complain to PayPal if I didn't ship it immediately. I didn't want to get into trouble, so I boxed my PS3 and was getting ready to leave for the post office. I got in my car and something just popped into my head that this was bullshit (in hindsight, that should have popped in wayyyy earlier).

I looked up Nigerian email scams, and found several people who had people from Nigeria show interest in something they were selling and receiving fake emails from PayPal. I figured that was what was happening to me, so I sent the guy a message saying that I sold it locally.

I then immediately start getting emails from the "Federal Bureo of Investigators" saying that they were coming to my house to arrest me for fraudulent activity against the guy I had been emailing and my crimes were a minimum of 5 years in federal prison.

I blocked the guy's email and informed PayPal of his fraudulent email address. His looked pretty legit sinced you just copied the layout/pictures that are in actual PayPal emails.
 
BPoole said:
I blocked the guy's email and informed PayPal of his fraudulent email address. His looked pretty legit sinced you just copied the layout/pictures that are in actual PayPal emails.
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Did you see if it was something like "paypall.com"? Fake sites 98% of the time have like, a single letter or strange domain for their site. I got a fake "your credit card has had fraud and your account has been locked" emails recently. I look at the address and it was some other domain. And of course my account was still ok to log into :p
 
Last year, there were two incidents where scammers came to my house asking me about my gas and utility prices, how they can lower the prices, etc. It seemed sketchy and I just told the guy I didn't want it. I remembered the name of the "company" he worked for and googled it. A new scam that started on the east coast.

Another guy from the same "company" came to my door and I told him I didn't feel like getting scammed that day, come the next day and I might reconsider. He looked really perplexed like he was surprised he was even scamming people, so I wonder if he even knew. Some guy probably just gave him a job and he went door to door doing this. Maybe.
 
Curler said:
Did you see if it was something like "paypall.com"? Fake sites 98% of the time have like, a single letter or strange domain for their site. I got a fake "your credit card has had fraud and your account has been locked" emails recently. I look at the address and it was some other domain. And of course my account was still ok to log into :p
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I believe it was PayPaISupport@PayPal.com (That is a capital 'i' at the end of both PayPals)
 
One time I was overburdened with the horadric cube in Diablo 2 and my little level ~30 unique items dropped on the ground, and one of them was my ghost armor shroud (or something along those lines). Of course, later on I found out just how completely useless the item was... but at the time IT MATTERED. IT HAD +1 TO ALL SKILLS!!!! (lol)

ONE TIME!

Never again has a single scam got me.... ever. I'm smurt.
 
One time I tried buying a camera from a site that didn't seem too dodgy, but I should have read the reviews more thoroughly because people had complained about never receiving their products. I cancelled my order, (because it had not shipped) but the company refused to give me a refund. I made a complaint to paypal and they forced the company to give me the refund.
 
BPoole said:
I believe it was PayPaISupport@PayPal.com (That is a capital 'i' at the end of both PayPals)
Click to expand...

Ah, then that's a little bit more tricky. I've seen fake emails where they somehow used the legit email. Then again, it was probably something like this. I played WoW a lot years back and scammers are always using "Blizzard's" email. They probably did do the capital 'i' thing with those. I just always assumed it was some sort of hack.

WoW taught me to install and learn to use NoScript well. I didn't realize that you could get MalWare just from viewing a linked picture on the Blizz forums :/



Oh, another memory popped into my head: I remember I was looking for a screensaver to download many many years back. Got one off some shady site and it didn't work well. Soon after, a thing on my computer popped up saying "FBI WARNING!! You are viewing pedo!! The FBI have been notified and will be seeing you soon!" or something. I screenshot and saved it for a while (now lost) but I remember being worried that someone installed some kind of Malware that might have had bad pics on it or something. Nothing ever happened of course. No idea how it was related to the site with the screensaver either than I did pick up something, and wasn't a "scam" per say.
 
yea, got ripped off 300 euros. The guy ripped off others for a total of 10k to buy himself weed

Guy got arrested and spent 5 months in jail. I got my money back a year later

Funny thing is (or sad really) this wasn't the first time he did it, he got arrested for the same thing several times before that. So god knows how many he scammed in his young life (he was in his early 20s)
 
Around 2001 I was 9 or 10 and me and my brother went in and with the help of parent's account got a Sega Genesis auction with 30 really good games for around 25 bucks shipped (I can't remember all the games but I know Castlevania Bloodlines was in there). After 2 months we realized it was never showing up. Then you only had money orders and there wasn't much protection so we just lost the money.

Game TZ around 2006 someone agreed to sell me TMNT Manhattan Project with manual for 11 bucks. I sent the guy a money order and he marked he had received it and after two weeks it never arrived. Suddenly he lists it again in another thread. After he stopped responding to my messages I publicly outed him in his for sale thread and he kept saying how I was trying to rip him off. Needless to say I never got the game and he was banned, at least it was a small amount.

In 2008 when I heard about PS3 "Game Sharing" I was trying to get someone to do it with me. On some gaming website there was a guy who wanted to game share and he had a game I wanted and wanted a game I had, it seemed fine. He told me about how he was scammed before and asked if he could please use my account first. I had no CC info and told him sure. The dude ended up logging into my account, spending 20 in giftcards I had on stupid crap and changed my password/email address. I had to call Sony and pretend I had a little brother who did it. Luckily they were able to give me my account back but they couldn't do anything about the 20 I lost. Such a dumb mistake I made.
 
I am routinely scammed by all these independent sellers on Amazon UK. Amazon always gives me the money back and it ends up being fine, but it's kind of fucking annoying how much scammery they allow. These shops pretty much always charge triple shipping or don't send the item at all. I always just let it go through, then file a report and get money back.
 
I only got scammed in Diablo 2 when I was around 12 years old. After countless hours of building my Hammerdin, I was hit with one of those autoit scripts that throw all your items on the floor and ever since then I am weary of every deal.
 
reader's digest sweepstakes scam in singapore
i replied that shit for perhaps 5+ years? the whole time they kept saying i've won a car or some bull shit
the 1 time i spent money on it was when i bought a stupid watch because supposedly it increases my chances

then 1 day during my lecture my lecturer asked us if any of us have ever received such a mail and asked us if it was real
 
Never, and I've ordered Microsoft Points from Ebay and
boner pills for a demanding but fun weekend from some random site :D
.

Knock on wood.
 
A friend of friend asked me the secret question to my e-mail account. It is a good thing I had done my tactic of writing crap in those fields so had no idea what he was even talking about.

A few days later he succeeded on a different friend. It was on that day that I learned a friend of a friend is a stranger.

I remember hearing a long time ago reading that someone bought some games via the GAF BST thread then did some internet searching and found the seller was trying to buy the games on another forum. Talk about awkward...

aku:jiki said:
I am routinely scammed by all these independent sellers on Amazon UK. Amazon always gives me the money back and it ends up being fine, but it's kind of fucking annoying how much scammery they allow. These shops pretty much always charge triple shipping or don't send the item at all. I always just let it go through, then file a report and get money back.
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What exactly are you buying? I have used marketplace about 50 times and had no problem.

Frustrated_Grunt said:
I bought a fake bootleg iPod on eBay once for $20. The price should have been the giveaway. It had no scroll, just a dpad underneath a wheel. It only held 50 megabytes of songs. It crashed periodically and died permanently after 3 weeks of owning it. I left negative feedback and got a hate-filled e-mail written in Chinese.
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Currygan said:
yup, bought a DQV DS copy from ebay and ended up being a Chinese pirated version. Didn't check where the seller was from, big mistake from my part. £4 down the khazi, I'm still pissed
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If you get counterfeit goods and paid via PayPal you can dispute these. PayPal will ask you to destroy items and you are refunded. This policy does have unforeseen consequences like this $2500 violin being destroyed.

cheststrongwell said:
My boss bought itune software from itune.com. He paid like 60 bucks for it. He thought it was the actual iTunes program.
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I see the crummy disclaimer at the bottom. Is that really enough to keep the site from being shut down? There is a logo that has an uncanny resemblance tot he Apple one.

WinoMcCougarstein said:
Yes, I purchased a steam key on Ebay but the fucking twat redeemed the code before sending it to me and tried to claim I was scamming him first. Such an asshole!
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Some people are dumb (or play it) when it comes to PC games. I know someone who bought a used a copy of SC2:WoL. Of course it didn't work. Seller acted confused.

I don't know if they ever resolved this (refund or battle.net account are the only ways, but latter can easily be recovered by seller).
 
Didn't get 'scammed' per se, but recently I've been a victim of identity fraud :(

Someone has been using my name to sign up for credit cards, new phone accounts etc. Luckily, they didn't get access to my bank details, but I cancelled my card just in case and got a new one.

Was weird lol
 
Yeah I've had calls from those Indian guys too OP, a good few times actually, I just hang up the phone now. When I was in Amsterdam I was trying to score some ecstasy and instead was sold a bag of smints. Not a scam in your sense OP but I was pretty pissed off all the same.
 
I got scammed out of 10k in Runescape a few months after I started playing. Granted, 10k in RS is like nothing, but it was the first 10k I had earned.

Also I constantly get emails on my old AOL email address claiming that accounts on websites that I've never registered for may have been compromised and such.
 
I was 20ish years old, lost 80 dollars on a weird dice game I didn't even understand. Game started using only a dollar and the guy made me earn 10 dollars and my greed kicked in (Could have quit). The stakes increased in logarithmic fashion and ended up losing 80usd. I managed to resist the idea that, if I continued, I could get that 80 back and put 100 dollars on top of it, by just playing another ~30 dollar game. Of course, if I had continued, I'd continue to lose even bigger, with still the possibility of getting that back and earning some more.

This was one of the best lessons I had, I paid 80 dollars for it.
 
Many years back, I worked behind the cash register at a gift store. During the busy christmas period, some guy pulled some weird shit with a £50 note and a £20 note halfway through the transaction ("oh wait, take this instead"), talking incessantly and generally just being as confusing as fuck. Huge queue behind him, I completely lost track of what end my arse was attached to and, after much mental back and forth and situation arithmetic, he left with his purchase and his change. End of the day and my cash register was £30 down. :( Motherfucker. My fault, but still. Bastard.
 
I got scammed buying weed off a random guy in Camden when I was younger. You live and learn I guess.

Never been scammed on the internet though. I'm pretty careful.

One way of avoiding being scammed is remembering that if a deal seems too good to be true, there's probably a catch.
 
Unless you count getting obviously pirated DVDs from ebay (right content, but they were obviously not official), not really. Got close one time though. I was walking through the market square and there was this young
gypsy
girl handing out flowers, roses IIRC, and she handed one to me when I walked past. I thanked her and then she held out her hand and claimed that I owed money for that flower. Noped and thrust the flower back to her. She can keep the damn flower and I can keep my money.
 
Once I bought a used Iphone from a guy for 200 Euros, but when I recieved the package (actually I didn't recieve it since the address was purposefully mispelled) there was a fucking wooden brick inside. I called the guy, and it turns out that someone inside his base (he was a soldier) stole the phone and replaced it with a faux package. The guy game me a refund and everything, so I guess his story was true after all.

On another note, there's a scammer I regulary bump into. The guy is my age, his strategy is to cry obnoxiously about his babies who got an incurable disease and he asks for money. Usually there are other guys with him, probably to check out for cops. His act his painfully fake, and the kids pictures are obiously from photostock or shit like that, hell the guy doesn't even look poor, actually he has more expensive clothes than mine. Also, if you ignore him he starts shit talking you saying things like how a cruel bastard or piece of shit you are.

Reporting this shit to the police is useless here, I would love to punch the brains out of him but I fear retailation from the mafia, as it usually is from these people :/
 
TheUsual said:
I didn't fall for it, but I received a random Steam message from someone who said that my account was compromised and that they needed my password and account login to stop it. The kicker: it was all in German and I live in the States.

I politely told them to go fuck themselves.
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Kinda fell for something like this.

Instead of random steam message, it was a chat message from a friend (whose account also had been hacked) who said to log into the steam community website to check something. He sent me a link to log into and like an idiot I did it. In my defense it looked like a steam community page and I didnt pay much attention to the URL.

Had to raise a ticket with Valve and send them scans of my retail games to get my account back.

This is before steam guard. Now, its almost impossible for something like that to happen again.
 
Yes I wired money to someone who had a domain I wanted to buy. I fell right into their sinkhole and wired it to them. I remember his name too. He took 100 bucks from me and disappeared.
 
I JUST bought a phone off from AliExpress, which is essentially a Chinese version of eBay. I thought the price looked too good to be true, but I clicked the button anyway because it was so damn cheap for the specs (64gb Xiaomi Mi3 for £200~? Yes please.).

As always whenever I make a purchase I immediately get buyer's regret, and start doing more research. I found information of fakes of this particular phone, with the fake having an identical shell but inferior specs (half the ram/lower res/worse cpu, etc). A compiled list of reputable sellers show that a 16GB version sells for £200 so alarm bells start ringing in my head.

I rush to cancel but orders can't be canceled until payment is processed (wtf?), and now it's been processed and shipped while I was asleep (since China's like 8 hours ahead of the UK). I've sent numerous messages and emails but I'm assuming none of them understand English very well or simply ignored the messages.

Here's hoping AliExpress' "Buyer Protection" works out...
 
Airan said:
I JUST bought a phone off from AliExpress, which is essentially a Chinese version of eBay. I thought the price looked too good to be true, but I clicked the button anyway because it was so damn cheap for the specs (64gb Xiaomi Mi3 for £200~? Yes please.).

As always whenever I make a purchase I immediately get buyer's regret, and start doing more research. I found information of fakes of this particular phone, with the fake having an identical shell but inferior specs (half the ram/lower res/worse cpu, etc). A compiled list of reputable sellers show that a 16GB version sells for £200 so alarm bells start ringing in my head.

I rush to cancel but orders can't be canceled until payment is processed (wtf?), and now it's been processed and shipped while I was asleep (since China's like 8 hours ahead of the UK). I've sent numerous messages and emails but I'm assuming none of them understand English very well or simply ignored the messages.

Here's hoping AliExpress' "Buyer Protection" works out...
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All those chinese seller sites are 100% knock offs. I've seen some really weird shit, AMD GTX 5000 graphics cards, cancer curing machines, pokemon cards with digimon on them, and this:

http://www.dhgate.com/product/whole...e-adult-size/138780835.html#s1-18-1|540459041
 
Today we recieved 4 phone calls trying to scam us. 1 time was a scam going around here saying you've won frequent flyer points, other other times our computer wasn't working.

That's a new record for us.
 
I got suckered into getting those extra insurance options at a car rental. Lucky I returned the car a day later.

My coworker messed around with those tech support calls from Microsoft scammers. They formatted his PC when he called them out. Lucky he was on a virtual machine (so called expert didn't pick up on it).
 
Feran said:
Almost fell for a scam at the gas station where a guy asks you for a bit of gas money to get home, etc. My wallet was in the car so I kinda shrugged at him and said sorry. Felt pretty bad for him at the time but I came back a few weeks later and saw him around again doing the same thing. :(
Click to expand...

Well this just made me feel a little better about that one time I denyed money to this person who tried to do the same thing to me. She seemed genuine, but in all likelihood was probably a scam.
 
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