One time when I was in middle school I started playing RuneScape, and there was this helpful guy hanging out in the starting area. He told me he could get me better gear if I followed him. He took me to the wilderness and killed me and stole all my stuff. I didn’t really know anything about the game so I thought that without my precious starting gear I would be lost, so I started a new account.
And then once I had played a lot and understood the game better, I made a bunch of sets of steel armor and food and I hung out in the starting area and gave it out for free to new players. Because fuck that guy. I decided I would take his evil and turn it into kindness.
I honestly don’t know what he had to gain, the starting gear is worthless. Maybe he just liked fucking people over.
I remember having the same thing happen to me in RS
When I was about 16 I was walking past a nightclub as some guys were packing up a van outside. One of them called out to me and started telling me a story about how they were fitting out the club with a new sound system and had some surplus speakers. They asked if I wanted to take them off their hands. Really, I wanted to go and research them first, but this was in the olden days before the entire internet was in your pocket. They showed me the brochure and manual, I gave them £200 cash, and they drove me home in the van with the speakers. On the journey I started to get suspicious and got them to drop me a few roads over from my actual house. Lugged the speakers home by hand, started researching them and found it was a common scam. The units themselves were totally fake and from what others had said were a fire hazard. Police weren’t interested as I had given the money freely. I had a buddy take them to the dump in his van. I spent quite a while researching who was behind it and ended up with the details of the “company” manufacturing the units in a workshop in London. I then spent a few weeks having fun prank calling them with various soundboards (Arnie was the best!). I made my peace with the whole scenario by framing it as an overpriced, but entertaining subscription to a guilt-free prank call experience.
Oh yeah, the old “white van speaker scam”, I’ve heard of that, there’s some interesting YouTube videos about it.
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.
Someone contacted me on Steam and asked if I wanted to play TF2 with him. It was one of my most played games at the time and I had a TF2 avatar, so no surprises here.
That person later asked me to rate their TF2 team on some website. Didn’t care first but did it eventually. The website needed Steam auth but just faked the Steam auth and relayed every bit of information you entered to steal your account.
Quickly realized my mistake and reset my password before anything happened. Im still surprised how much effort went into this fake rating site just to steal some Steam accounts.
Something similar to this happened to me but I think it was for CSGO. The steam sign in page was a fake popup window inside the main website, draggable and all. I realized it was fake when I noticed it was light theme while my computer was dark theme.
Edit: I realized it was fake before I signed in, luckily
Had some Steam based scammer a couple months ago. I basically instantly suspected a scam and played along, trying them to waste time.
Sadly, they didn’t play along that much and ghosted me :(
A buddy of mine got her Discord account hacked by someone doing this. They gave her another Discord user who was playing as an employee. To “prove” the account was hers she had to change the validated email to something they sent. She mentioned something about it and then I and another person in IT started freaking out.
All in all it was fine and she got her account back. I think she was just embarrassed. I think it’s the first time she’s ever had someone try to do something like that. Me and the other person who caught it were trying to reassure her that we noticed it because we’ve had to do so many IT trainings and phishing tests over the years.for work.
yeah, the second they said something about reporting me by accident and steam banning my IP I knew it was a scammer. Although I suspected it before, as I never had a random person message in in 20 years of using steam.
I had hoped to lure the scammer a little bit further and figure out what they wanted to do, but I got too excited and scared them. very sad
They were almost certainly going to tell you that if you didn’t act then both of you would get banned then direct you to a fake Steam employee or fake website. It’s interesting they randomly messaged you. Normally this relies on being done to friends.
I have basically the same story, except it was one of my actual friends on Steam asking me to rate their CS:GO team. I fell for it since I was trying to be nice, and luckily changed my password before they could turn around and use my account for the same thing.
I haven’t changed my Steam password since I got an account many, many, many years ago. No idea what it is anymore—something really short and basic—but other people do. I get two-factor hits all the time 🤣
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.
Somebody on RuneScape back in the early 2000s threatened to report me if I didn’t tell them my password and so I reluctantly told them and immediately got locked out of my free, low level account :-(
I made a purchase on a sketchy site (during Covid when things were hard to find). A day or so later, some unauthorized transactions were made on my card. “Bank” called from actual number of my bank, to verify if I actually made the transactions. provided some of my personal information, transaction amount etc then asked to verify ssn. It was very convincing.
Luckily I refused because I know anyone can call you claiming to be any number, and I didn’t give out any info, and said I would call back that number (my bank).
Bank had no knowledge of a call.
15 minutes later, get real fraud department call from my bank. They just wanted to know if it was fraud or not and didn’t ask for any other info.
Moral of the story: if someone calls you, never give out personal info. Tell them you will call back if needed.
Anyone can call from any number? Surely it’s not easy to spoof numbers.
My bank sometimes call me with questions about verification, as I travel a lot and have weird purchase patterns that can span several continents over a few days.
But it’s easy for me to verify that it’s them: Not only is Norwegian a rare language among Nigerian princes, but I use a tiny local bank so I recognize them by the dialect.
And even if it were a scam verification, they only ask for relatively inconsequential information, such as how much I have in my savings account, where I use my card the most, and roughly how much is paid into my account by my employer every month.
I once had one of those crypto-people message me with a sales pitch, asking for money to help start their small business in Africa or something like that (can’t remember what, I think it was a micro-brewery)
As an actual business owner, their initial ideas sounded okay, and I began forwarding them resources on how to secure a low-interest loan from their government and grants and stuff like that and then they abruptly closed up with:
“This is scam, brother. This is scam. You have good heart. I tell you only once, do not message this number.”
We forget that on the other end of scams are real people with real problems, morals, and lives. The person on the other end of your scam probably started to feel bad and helped you out. And likely that person is being forced into performing these scams on people.
There’s an excellent “Search Engine” podcast episode about this that came out recently called “Who’s behind these scammy text messages we’ve all been getting.” It’s well worth a listen because it dives into all the slavery and human trafficking involved in modern scams that people aren’t aware of.
The especially vile thing about these scam centers is that often they trick normal people just trying to find work and support their family. They steal their passport and then hold them hostage with slave labour.
Can you link the podcast?
That’s the website, but it’s not rendering for me for some reason.
Here’s a PocketCast link:
Not the one you asked for, but another interesting episode on the topic: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/141/
Look up “pig butchering” by John Oliver. Yes, this is the technical term for it.
The podcast goes much more in depth than Oliver did. But they’re both good content.
I sold cutco knives for a month.
If you’re looking for a job, stay the fuck away from anything dealing with “CutCo” or “Vector Marketing.”
Or any other kind of pyramid scheme, really
So what is actually the deal with CutCo? I know they’re a scam, everyone knows they’re a scam, but this one particular woman I know to be in general not a dummy, says her son spent the summer selling their knives once and made good money.
Was he just lying to her? How does the scam work?
Okay, so, it’s not technically a scam. It’s an MLM. The salesman has to buy the stuff they want to sell up-front, and then they have to try and sell it to people. If no one wants to buy, then they’re stuck with a whole bunch of whatever–knives in the case of CutCo/Vector–and out the money that they spent. If they happen to be an exceptionally good salesperson, then they can sell everything they purchased, and use their profit to buy more, and sell more, etc.
The issue is that the knives aren’t particularly great. They’re solidly ‘okay’, and that’s about it. But despite being just kind of okay, the prices are on the higher end. That is, you can get Global or Shun for a similar price, and Global and Shun are both quite good. So if you’re a serious cook, your going to spend the same and get better knives. If you’re a typical home cook, you’re not going to see the value in spending that much on kitchen knives.
But! The real money is in convincing some poor sucker to buy his stock to sell from you. You buy from your supplier, and then you sell at a markup to some other poor schmuck that then has to sell knives at either a higher cost or lower profit margin to someone else. It’s a game of hot potato, and the person holding it at the end gets burned.
MLMs can be actually viable jobs for a very select few of people. Not entirely unlike how you can theoretically make money at a casino. There need to be winners to the game once in a while, or else no one would play. The game is just rigged wildly out of your favor.
The general structure of an MLM as I understand it is sort of a cross between a wholesale job and playing a mobile gacha game. Unlike a normal business where you purchase stock to match your demand, and only stock items that actually sell, an MLM contractually obligates you to buy a certain volume of stock, and each shipment is essentially a lootbox full of who knows what. It then becomes your responsibility to get rid of the stock any way you possibly can.
When you buy all that stock, you are not buying it from a factory or a warehouse. You are buying it from another person in the same position as you, one layer up. They are also playing the lootbox gacha and trying to get rid of all the crap. Except, hmm, now they have at least one person beneath them who is contractually forced to buy from them, and can’t select which stock they’re buying. Gee, I wonder what you’re gonna be getting…
Whenever you actually do manage to sell something off, a cut of that kicks back to the person who sold you that stock. And a piece of that kickback goes to the person who sold them that stock, and so on, up and up.
The real money in MLMs is having so many people beneath you that the kickbacks start adding up into significant income. This is theoretically achievable. But it requires a very specific kind of personality matrix who is not squeamish about being a little cut-throat to get ahead, and generally requires a significant investment where you are going deep into the red just for the opportunity. And even if you do make it there, you have to accept the knowledge that your profitability can only exist necessarily because of the existence of many people beneath you all spinning those slots and losing the rigged game to the house (who by this point is you).
The knives are decent; if the only way to get a new one wasn’t through an MLM I might actually buy them.
It’s not an MLM or pyramid scheme; it is regular sales employment. You’re not getting other people to sell them for you nor are you encouraged to find others looking to join the sales team. It just sucks dick because the pay is shit (and they go through hoops to pay you less or nothing; which is where the scam part comes in), they treat you like shit, and you have to basically sell them door-to-door.
It’s stupid because the knives are great products; I still have my sample set because they actually rock. They just only sell them like Tupperware clubs and only market them via word of mouth. They’d be making bank if they just sold them to retailers instead of fucking with young people looking for their first job.
Oh ok, good to know! They’re always lumped in with MLMs so I always thought they were one. I appreciate the correction, even if they still have a predatory business model—just a different one than MLMs.
Fun fact: MLMs cannot be made illegal because they’re a quintessential expression of pure capitalism.
Got duped into giving my login info to a dude who promised to put money into my bank. Lost my account for like a week, and when I finally recovered it, they had taken what little I had. I cried.
Runescape as a child was a good place to learn life lessons
Hahahaha I also just posted a story about being a kid on RuneScape!
Mine was about a guy who told me he could get me good gear and walked me out to the wilderness and killed me.
Ouch. My heart goes out to you.
2 minutes to realize I couldn’t log in because someone else was logged in as me wasn’t an error. 3 minutes to realize and verify the login page was a clone. An eternity to change my password immediately. The bot had already handed off 1.6B in gold, my many many feathers, lobsters, swordfish, and ores. Probably my armors too. Never even left the Grand Exchange. I raged and then I cried. Haven’t played it since.
Sad memories, but good lessons for adults too.
I went to what I thought was a job interview, but they were really just recruiting people to sell Cutco stuff. I was still pretty excited about it, because I’d never heard of Cutco before. When I got home, Dad explained that Cutco was basically a pyramid scheme.
They almost got me. They had rented space in an office park and everything; it wasn’t at some dude’s house. The interview seemed legit… to a young and clueless college student, anyway.
A bank tried to sell me a pension fund contract. Luckily, I know my math and found out that it was so bad that I’d call it a scam.
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…
In college I lost one of my jobs and knew I needed another one fast or I wouldn’t be able to make rent. I spammed my resume on Indeed and Monster.
I got an email offering an IT-adjacent job in town. It was Saturday and they said I could stop by in a few weeks to fill out the paperwork or we could do it over the phone and start Monday. I called so I could get my first paycheck before the end of the month. We eventually got to her asking for my Social Security number and I froze.
I realized this could be a scam, but I was really desperate. I tried to think of a way to test them, so I said that I just realized I would be unavailable during certain hours, would that still be okay? She said she had to put me on hold to talk to the manager. After a while she came back and said it should work, but I would have to discuss the specifics with my supervisor once I started.
That sounded real to me. If it was a scam surely she would have just immediately said my schedule was fine, right? I gave her my SSN. She said I was ready to go and to have fun on Monday. I got there and it was just a parking lot. Couldn’t get a response via phone or email.
A couple months later I found out someone across the country had used my SSN and I had to freeze my credit.
The problem is you have to give your SSN for legitimate employers as well. It is mind-bogglingly stupid that there’s a magic number you have to keep secret and also have to give to everyone to participate in modern economy.
Purchasing my first home, apparently all info regarding the sale is public information. Companies scrape or buy this data and then spam your mailbox with various extra services. In my case, it was mortgage premium insurance or something like that. Anyways, the letter I received in the mail went something like this: “You forgot something important regarding your home purchase”. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like that.
I’m a first time home buyer and I am trying to stay on top of things. Of course, because they are able to get all the information regarding the sale. It looks legit, they have my name, address, loan number, loan amount, the bank serving the loan and everything. I call to make sure everything is alright and fortunately they didn’t answer. I took the extra time to look up what mortgage premium insurance even was and that is how I came across the fact that it may be a scam.
Anyways, they call me back eventually and by this time I am on to them. I ask some questions regarding their company and the entire time they keep repeating the name of the bank that is serving my loan, but refuse to give me the name of their company. After a bit more back and forth they finally let it slip that they are from some unrelated insurance company to which I decline their offer. I wanted to curse them out, but I just wasn’t raised that way.
Edit: A lot of people don’t take online privacy seriously. Usually going whats the harm. I was never really comfortable with it to the point of apathy, but I was a bit lax at times. This experience made me find out first hand what the harm of everyone having access to your data is.
