How could I have ever been so stupid? I'm an educated person. I mean, I'm no genius but I thought I could recognize basic tomfoolery in front of me. But every once and awhile, scammers get the best of you. Maybe because we're too trusting and want to believe the best in world. But that is how we fall into the hands of the these charlatans and thieves. There are too many people out there that are too lazy to work so they just want to steal from others. It's hateful, so stay vigilant.
Redditoru/Pissgfwanted to see who would be willing to confess about the times they've been bamboozled, by asking:
What's the most elaborate scam you fell for?
Life Lesson #1... NEVER GIVE YOUR MONEY TO STRANGERS WITHOUT PROOF OF PURCHASE!!!
People, never just blindly shell out coin. I learned that the hard way. Thankfully I learned early. Damn Columbia House.
A Gift
give me christmas GIF by TargetGiphy"I had a visa gift card for $100 I got for my birthday, and wanted to check the balance after a few purchases online. I look up "check visa gift card balance" and clicked on the first thing i saw."
Room for Rent
"I put a room up for rent once. Someone applied and said they would be moving in at the first of the month. They said they were military and switching bases. This person said they were going to go ahead and ship their car out and fly in. The car arrived and was offloaded by truck. A few days later the car was gone. The person never arrived. A month or so later the police knocked and asked about the car."
"Ended up being that the car was stolen by whoever this person was that shipped it and the person who picked it up was a buyer who thought it was legit. Apparently he had a set of keys mailed to him and a fake title. Idk if it ever got sorted but they initially assumed that I was a part of it."
$20
"At the start of college one year when everyone was moving into houses in the usual sh*tty but affordable part of a college town, a guy walked up to us and said he can get us free HBO, he'd just take $20, he knew a guy. We're like cool, he takes out his cell phone, walks a few steps away out of earshot, says check our TV, we go, and lo and behold, HBO! We give him $20 and he walks away. A week later, it was gone. The dude just called HBO for some free trial week. He must have hit up every college kid moving in that day and made bank."
The Best 'Actually, You're Speaking To The Boss' Experience | George Takei’s Oh Myyy
Cousins
"Ohhh boy, I still cringe about that. Back in the late 90s, early 00s when chatrooms were popular, I met this guy there and we ended up chatting pretty much daily. He had an unusual name for the region, that should have been the first clue. We chatted and sent letters to each other (by actual post)... tried to meet up with him so many times, but he always had something come up. One night on new year's eve when we were supposed to meet finally, HIS COUSIN shows up and said yea he'll come soon, he told me to wait here with you."
"Pretended to call him several times to ask where he was, an hour or so later I just went back home and never talked to the guy again. Turned out the "cousin" was the guy I was chatting with and he had made a deal with another guy to see how long I would believe all this. I can't believe I fell for it. Keep in mind I was 16 something back then."
Live and in Color
Happy The Simpsons GIFGiphy"In the late 50s or early 60s, some guy came into my grandpas shop selling color TVs out of the back of a truck."
"The family had never had a color tv, and the price was way less than what a store charged, so he bought one. He excitedly brought it home, plugged it in and turned it on. Black and White. He played with the knobs and antenna, nothing. No color. The guy took a bunch of old black and white TVs, slapped a rainbow sticker on them, and sold them as color. Brilliant."
I've never trusted gift cards. If you love me, give me cash. And I have seen way too many movies and read too many stories about crazy renters. Buy, flip and sell. It's a much saner purchase.
Travel Fail
Passport Northside GIF by AMA LOUGiphy"A website faked itself as official passport department I filled the forms for passport update there made payment and all and in the end realized... It was fake. Never got the money back!"
Ruined
"I traded this guy my Full Rune armor because he said he could trim it for me."
"I met a dude in the game while chilling at the GE and we talked for awhile. Became friends, did bossing and stuff together. Then after like a year plus of chilling and stuff he asked for money for a bond. I gave him 100m just to be nice and he called me a loser, blocked me and logged out."
I'm Dumb
"Not exactly elaborate but this girl in my fifth grade class brought soy sauce in a coke bottle once. Then she proceeded to "share" it with me and I being the dumb butt that I was straight up open the bottle and chugged it down before even smelling it. That was a bad day."
The Grift
"I don't know if it's necessarily the most elaborate scam of all time, but there are a range of fake sites online that offer ESTA visa for entry into the US. The funny thing about the sites is that they actually process your visa, but they just do it by sending your details to the official site and charging you a hundred dollars or so of idiot tax. I got caught a few years back and I wasn't even really mad. It was such an amazingly set-up grift, and what made it even better was that you really had no recourse because they were actually giving you what you paid for."
Beware y'all.
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"What's the most mysterious thing happened in your life that you can't find any explanation for?"
Mom Acting Weird
"My mum is a type 1 diabetic, has been since she was 11 years of age."
"When me and my little brother were very young, I was about 7 and he was 5 , I came into my mum's room to find she was acting extremely strange."
"She looked almost drunk, and wasn’t really responsive."
"I went to pick up her insulin needles to see if she would react to that and she didn’t."
"So I panicked and phoned my Nan who told me to put the phone down and dial 999."
"For some reason I was so frightened and confused I didn’t, and sent my little brother outside to get help while I tried to get my mum to respond to me."
"My brother came back in crying saying he couldn’t find anyone and then about five minuets later this woman just walked into my mum's bedroom, called me by my name, and my brothers, said she knew my mum and help is coming, she was calm, soft-spoken and had a warm feeling about her."
"I didn’t recognize this woman and neither did my brother."
"Shortly after the ambulance arrived and got my mum's sugar levels back up."
"And when I went to find the woman, she was gone."
"Like literally gone."
"When my mum came round I explained to her about this mysterious woman and what she looked like."
"And my mum had absolutely no idea who she was, and we never saw her again."
"If she didn’t help us my mum would have died eventually."
"Still gives me shivers now."- leeshouse90
Portrait Of A Lady On Fire Neon Rated GIF by NEONGiphyPsychic, or lucky?
"When I was around 18 a friend and I were traveling in Europe."
"We were walking along a pleasant, quiet street in Rome one day and saw an elderly homeless man sitting on the street."
"He said to us if he could guess our date of birth could we give him some money?"
"Of course we said ok."
"He did it! "
"He told us both our correct dates of birth!"
"Never met him before and never saw him again."- robertodurian
Some Unfinished Work, Maybe?
"I was at my mother in law's flat in Hungary."
"Fyi I don't speak Hungarian, so I couldn't be aware of any of this."
"I tend to go to bed later that my wife, and for the first couple of nights, I had trouble falling asleep because around midnight I could hear the neighbor upstairs."
"It's an old block of flats made under the communist era, walls are incredibly thin."
"Walk in high heels, which was very annoying."
"I could also hear little objects fall on the floor, and I told my wife it sounded like the plastic buttons you have on some clothes."
"She looked at me funny and told me her niece hated to sleep in that room because she was scared by the noises coming from upstairs."
"I said that was a bit exaggerated, and I thought it was until my wife told me the flat upstairs had been empty for the past at least 4 years."
"Neighbor died years before that, and guess what?"
"She was a tailor, always nicely dressed and wearing high heels."- mimzou
High Heels Shoes GIF by Real Housewives Of CheshireGiphyGone Without A Trace
"When I was a kid, I participated in Big Brothers Big Sisters, which if you don't know what that is it's pretty much just a mentorship program in the US."
"I basically just hung out with this dude Chris for a couple hours a week."
"We'd go to the movies, out to eat, he'd help me with my homework, that kinda thing."
"One day, he tells me that he's going to Baltimore for a couple weeks and when I should expect him back."
"The day rolls around and I give him a call to see if he's back yet."
"A man whose voice I didn't recognize answered and I asked if Chris was there."
"He said no."
"I asked him when Chris would be back just kinda thinking it was someone staying at his house or watching his dogs or something."
"But he said that I had the wrong number, that he and his wife had lived there for years, and there was never a Chris there."
"I double checked in the phonebook to see if it was the right number which it was because I had it circled."
"I was confused so I just said sorry and hung up, and I never heard from Chris ever again."- theautomemoriesdoll
A Clever Distraction?
"When I was 10 or so I was staying at my grandma's over the summer break and we were having breakfast."
"We barely started eating when the phone rang."
"She left the dining room and I followed her thinking that maybe they were my parents calling."
"When we returned most of the food was gone."
"She asked me if I ate while she was on the phone and I said 'no'."
"There was no one else home and there were no pets."
"My grandma just shook it off saying we might have eaten more than she remembered but I am absolutely positive that I had at most two bites of my toast by the time the phone rang."- queenliz2fr
Hungry Good Morning GIF by HBO MaxGiphyMystery Benefactor
"Every month around the 5th I get a letter with exactly 23 dollars."
"No note, no return address."
"I’ve asked family, relatives, friends, the two past occupants of this apartment."
"Nobody knows anything about it."
"It is not addressed to me, but to my unique postal address."
"The total is now exactly 1886, I have just stashed it all in a box."
"I do not want to spend it in case it is cursed."- Puzzleheaded_Ad928
A Comforting Sign
"My grandmother always loved roses and had them growing in her back yard."
"She died in a December and when we were gathered at her house for the funeral my father happened to look out the back window and saw a bright red rose had blossomed."
"It stood out brightly against the snow."
"He brought it in and put it in a vase on the kitchen table."
"We all left for the funeral and when we came back the rose was on the living room floor."
"No one had been in the house while we were gone."
"My father is the most hard-headed person alive but he was convinced it was his mothers way of telling him she was all right."- regular6drunk7
Mystery Portal?
"We have a built in wardrobe in our bedroom."
"About a month ago our cat had managed to get herself inside and I must have closed the door."
"I heard her meowing and I opened the door and she jumped out and walked off."
"Silly cat."
"I closed the wardrobe door."
"Less than five minutes later I hear a meow in the wardrobe, I open the door and to my surprise, our cat jumps out again and walks off."
"My partner and I were both stunned as there is no way into the wardrobe with the doors closed."
"Neither of us have any idea how this happened."- TorthOrc
Cat Jumping GIFGiphyLost Time
"I had just picked up a coworker from her house heading to work.'
"We are just talking and chatting, "how'd your weekend go" type of stuff."
"We are maybe 5 miles away from her house, when all of a sudden, we realize we are in town pulling into works parking lot."
"We both kinda look at each other not sure what happened."
"We had gone near 20 miles in a blink of an eye."
"And what cemented this experience as something that I actually happened, and not just simply losing track of time, IS THE TIME!"
"It should have taken us almost half an hour to get to work."
"Instead the time from when I picked her up was 2:30."
"And the time when we got to the building was 2:40."
"There is no way in HELL!"
"We couldn't have gotten there that fast."
"From that point on we both called that experience the time when we Jumped, like from the movie Jumper."
"I have no explanation why."
"I'll also state, I don't believe in the paranormal or supernatural."
"So this experience is one of those things that makes me question my own sanity."- belac4862
car dark GIFGiphyThere must be an explanation for these circumstances...
Even if it's not an explanation that will make any sense, otherworldly or not.