I just wonder. Some scams are so obvious that it feels like you would need to be blind not to see the big signs pointing to it (You Won A Million Dollars! Just Give Us Your Credit card Info!) I do know that not all scams are "Nigerian Prince" obvious. So I wonder if any of you ever fell for one, or if any one you knew did. Because I'm curious about what kind of scams are more likely to get people to believe, and what are the possible actions to take after one has been a victim. I know one time, I would have fallen for a scam on Kijiji; luckily, I checked the message I was sent and search results came up with similar cases, some of them on notorious scam checker sites. Avoided a bullet there!
It depends on how internet savvy people are, I find. I, myself, wouldn't fall for such obvious scams, although I might have been more likely to when I was first learning the internet. If I'd been desperate for quick money, I may have allowed myself to be suckered in. My mother is an internet novice. She's never been scammed exactly, but I have had to steer her away from getting scammed in the past. Now she calls me whenever so much as a pop-up makes itself known on her laptop screen, which I suppose is the safer option.
Yea, I know someone...ME!!! -and I still feel such a fool even after all this time. I bought some clothes from a Chinese clothing "wholesaler" and was well and truly duped. The website was so clean and polished, the clothes absolutely gorgeous. The alarm bells should have sounded crystal clear when I saw the prices, but I was so taken in I didn't stop to think. The ironic thing is, I knew all about internet scams and how to look out for them, I was a member of a few relevant forums etc When the clothes arrived, to say they were distinctly sub par would not even begin to cover it. I tried to chase it up with them, but of course I didn't get anywhere. I retrospectively checked the internet for reviews of this company and wow! there were gazillions out there, I couldn't even finish reading them all. All NEGATIVE, mainly American and British.
I still can't believe I got suckered into buying and selling domains to this day. I am still waiting to get my money back but I need evidence that I actually sent them a cancellation letter and I don't see how I'm ever going to find it. Plus the window is going to be closed from it because it's getting closer to being a year.
When I used to have dial up internet, I got an email from AOL saying that it was time to pay my monthly fee. I realized that it wasn't from AOL when someone tried to charge $1,900 to my debit card. But it was a prepaid debit card so it got declined and I laughed when I imagined the thief being declined. I closed the debit card that day.
I almost fell for a scam once. It was my first week on the net and I get this email, "we got some money in an account, yadda, yadda . . . send us your account number, etc, etc. Later that evening while listening to the radio [BBC to be precise], they were talking about these scams. Coincidence? From then on I was not one to be enticed by offers of money or anything else that seemed to good to be true.
I have to say, ever since my experience I am extra cautious and will do extensive research on a site, look up reviews on many different sites, look the company up on discussions forums etc if I get the slightest twinge of suspicion. I exhaust any and all precautions I can observe, so that if it blows up in my face I can at least say I did take steps to guard against it; unlike with my first scam.
Yeah it's easy to spot scams these days but I do fall short on them sometimes especially when some of the offers are just striking the fire of your interest. I once received an email, which ended up on my spam folder about me being selected for an art exhibit in L.A. Now normally I wouldn't bother with these things but sometimes my email account dumps some of my non-spam mails in the spam folder so I was a bit curious as to what the mail was about since it looks pretty legit. But once I clicked it, the site asked for credit card and bank details and I immediately went back.
Yes, and sadly it was me. I was attempting to buy a soccer jersey online, and saw one for a relatively cheap price. I ordered it and when it came, the number was wrong, the name misspelt, and it was overall a bad purchase. Never again.
I was almost scammed by a Nigerian buyer once. I tried to sell my laptop through a local buy-and-sell website and got a message from this Nigerian guy who said he'd pay twice the price I posted if I ship my laptop to his address in Nigeria. I was already skeptical about it but I gave him my PayPal ID, anyway. I got an email immediately after that and it was supposedly a confirmation from PayPal, acknowledging that the Nigerian guy already sent his payment. Thankfully, I was in the habit of checking my account. My gut feeling was right. My account balance remained unchanged. I checked the shady PayPal email again and saw that the domain was different from the domain that PayPal normally uses. I sent the scammer a message and told him I had already reported him to the authorities. He stopped replying to me after that.
I received a lot of scams from my email and even on my phone. A message congratulating you for winning in the lottery which was drawn electronically. That you won a huge amount of money and if you are interested in claiming your prize, you must pay 10% of your total prize as tax and you will be given a name, phone number and email address of their contact person. Unluckily for them, I've read similar modus like this before and I was already aware about this type of scam.
Yes. My mother was a victim of a scam, specifically a pyramid scam which promised my mom that she's going to be rich quickly, saying it would just take a few months, without even her sweating out or working for it. Obviously, my mother believed this person and she invested about $200 dollars in this company. Unfortunately, she did not earn a single cent from it. A good lesson learned though.
One of my friends almost fell for the Nigerian scams. I came to know about it when I found him asking other friends for some money. When I enquired why he was asking for money, I came to know that he is trying to pay for a package so that he can get some $500 mn (or something similar). I told him about the scams and also alerted his wife to it. She told me that he had been on international calls for the past few days and she was not aware why he was calling international. She thought he was being unfaithful. Even today he feels he lost out on those millions due to my meddling. Talk about being unfaithful..
Yes, I definitely know someone myself. No, I didn't fall for the notorious Nigerian Scams. No, fortunately I knew these were scams from the moment I saw them. But the scams I did fall for the were the money making work at home scams. These aren't so easy to figure out. In the past I made the huge mistake of thinking that I had to pay in order to work. Wrong, all this did was give money to the individual who was scamming me and left me with nothing. Not even the so called work at home program. Then there was the program where I paid hundreds of dollars to be in bellied up then they wanted me to pay to be in something else they were doing. My reaction was wait a minute I already paid you, why do I need to pay again. Yes, scam big time. I am now more cautious about what I do, and I won't pay for a program unless they have a legitimate offer that is real. If someone is sketchy about what the program is all about thats the first red flag not to get involved with it.
An elderly neighbour of mine was duped out of his life savings by a scam, he was initially sent a letter from overseas informing him that he had won a million dollars. The letter told him all he had to do was send a cheque for £25 as an ''admin'' fee to claim his winnings. He sent the cheque and then received another letter saying he needed to send another £25 for them to ''process'' his winnings. This pattern continued and the winnings never materialised, it wasn't until the gentlemans daughter became concerned that the truth emerged, he had been scammed out of £90,000 believing he was going to be a millionaire. The moral of this story is that you can never win a competition for which you have not entered. These type of letters telling you that you have won money are always too good to be true. In the case i talked about the scammers could not be caught as they were operating from overseas, these crooks target elderly people, this disgraceful practice must be stopped.
I receive tons of scam emails that do look very real but luckily I know better. I can see why people fall for them though, one that I see a lot is being billed on paypal or banned so you click on there link login and boom they have your details. Very sneaky and very clever.
Yeah I also cannot believe how people fall into those email scams. But they just don't know any better.. I've had some close friends get scammed by those nigerian email scams.. I laughed at them at first.. But then felt really sorry because they were quite naive and innocent, having not been on the internet for long enough to learn that not everything is as it seems.
There are more scams than people are willing to admit. Most of them are online but there are also offline scams. I know of a middle aged woman who encountered a confidence trickster who offered to pray for her financial health. She offered that she had $120 and out of an inexplainable trance, she handed the money to him and he took a calculated french leave.
My mother would be a victim of more than a few because she is not very savvy when it comes to the internet . She regularly sends me online earning opportunities that she think I might be interested in, never clocking onto the fact that their are obvious scam red flags in just the advertising alone. My older sister was scammed by a false modelling agency.