Real-Life Scam Victims Tell Their Stories
Since the invention of email and telephones, scam attempts have been a part of our everyday lives. Some are incredibly obvious and easy to ignore, but then there are those which shut down our common sense and have us believing ever word.
These brave Redditors share the stories of times they found themselves victims of a scammer’s devious tactics.
1. Unintended Involvement
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 in the 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 later, I learned the dark truth.
That day, the authorities knocked on my door 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.
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2. The OG Scam
My grandmother gave away my grandparents’ life savings to a Nigerian scammer. She fell for one of those emails from someone stating that my grandfather’s long-lost uncle died and left them $2 million and a Mercedes and they only needed five thousand dollars to process the transaction. This went on for close to two years—and the way it happened was chilling.
The money was taken slowly. Each time they called, it was a different excuse. The car was stuck in California in customs and they needed money to get it out. The car was halfway there but ran out of gas, or had blown a tire.
It was one thing after another. My dad and the rest of the family begged her to stop sending money, but she truly believed in her heart the money and car were on their way.
My dad contacted every government agency there was to try to stop it. But they all said they couldn't help because she was still willingly giving them money.
Eventually, I think she came back to reality and my grandfather gave those people a piece of his mind. They were able to recover some of the money, but not nearly all of it.
3. It’s Still A Mystery
I had gotten laid off and I started looking for another job and posted my resume online.
In July, I got a call from a lady (let's call her B) who said she was a recruiter for a chemical company in a neighboring state, in a town not far from where I had some relatives.
She said she saw my resume and thought I'd be a good fit for her company.
I would essentially be doing the same job I had been before, but the pay was almost double what I had been making. So I agreed to an interview.
A couple of days later I got another call from B saying that she had set up a phone interview with P, who was the hiring manager at the chemical company. I spent a few hours digging into the website.
A week before my start date, I got a call from B. She said they wanted to push my start date back a week, since they had auditors from corporate on site and they didn't want to focus on training someone new while they were undergoing a process audit.
Sounded reasonable, even if it was a little inconvenient for me. The next week, I got another call from B. She said they wanted to push my start date again.
They didn’t want me to be starting in the middle of the pay period. Okay, that kind of makes sense, I guess, so once again, I rescheduled everything and paid some additional fees to do so.
The following week, I called B and confirmed that everything was still on track. She said it was, so I went ahead and loaded up the truck and turned in my apartment keys and moved.
The day before I was scheduled to start my new job, I got another call from B. My stomach turned. I was sure she was calling to tell me that there was another delay, and I was running a little low on cash by this point. But instead, she told me the name of the contact person I was supposed to ask for and wished me good luck. Little did I know, the worst was yet to come.
I made the commute the next day, showed up 15 minutes early, went to the security/reception desk, introduced myself and asked for my contact person. They lady looked at something on her computer and was like, "We don't have anyone by that name here."
I figured I made a mistake somewhere, maybe misheard it or wrote it down wrong, something like that.
So I ask for P, the HR manager. She looks up something on her computer and says, "P doesn't work out of this location. He's in a different state.” So now I'm very confused, and I call B.
She says not to worry, there's just been some kind of miscommunication, to just hang out and she'd call me back in 15 minutes. So I wait 15 minutes.
Then I wait another 15 minutes. Then another. After an hour, I called B again. "We're sorry, the number you are trying to reach is no longer in service. Please hang up and try your call again.” It was surreal. I mean I was just dumbfounded.
I had no idea what was going on. I ended up driving back home and trying to call B a couple of more times that day.
I'd obviously been had, but there’s still a part about it that bothers me. The biggest question that remains is: Why? I never gave B any money, or any info that wasn't on my resume. So why would she go to such lengths to get me to uproot my life? I mean, I know the old adage about everyone being the villain of someone else's story, but I can't honestly imagine what I could have done to anyone to make them go that far to mess with me.
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4. TV Truck Trick
In the late 50s, some guy came into my grandpa’s 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.
