Someone You Know Scammed or Almost Scammed?

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Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2014 8:18 pm

I'm curious as to what percentage of folks here have known someone IRL who was scammed, or almost scammed. If you answer "yes" please give a brief idea of who the person was (no identifying details please!) and what the situation was. The main reason I'm asking is because I so often hear the sentiment that "folks who fall victim are greedy and deserved it" or "folks who fall for that are ignorant." I'm trying to collect data to prove otherwise.

Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2014 8:22 pm

I had been baiting for about a year when a good friend of mine contacted me because her boyfriend had fallen victim to a Western Union "mystery shopper" scam and wanted to know if there was any way to get their money back. I warned them about recovery scams. They were unemployed and desperate for a job, so when he got the email offering a "mystery shopping" position he immediately jumped on it. I saw copies of the lad's emails. The English was better than usual and the whole format was very professional. The check appeared real, and it took the bank over two months to let him know it wasn't. By that time, of course, he had already wired the money to the lad & suddenly his account was overdrawn by several thousand dollars. The lad instructed him to keep $200 for himself, which he did, before he knew that the check was no good.

Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2014 8:52 pm

That would be me.... I signed up for a penpal website about 10 years ago. I met some great people from all over the world, including a man from somewhere in Africa (I forget the country). I knew nothing about scams at the time. We talked for probably three months.

There was a war, and he was trying to raise money and donations for a refugee camp. He only mentioned it in passing for a while. He also talked about making a trip to the US and possibly coming to visit.

I was completely taken in. I gave him my address and phone number (he called and spoke to me once, which was SO COOL because I'd never had a call from outside the US before). When things got bad for the kids in his refugee camp, I offered to hold a fund raiser and send him the money.

As soon as I told my husband, he laughed at me and told me I was being scammed. At first I was angry with him for being so uncaring and cynical. Kids needed help! Then, when he finally convinced me it was a scam, I was ashamed and humiliated, but also scared. I'd given our contact information to a criminal. I had a toddler. I wasn't sure what to do.

As for the ignorant part, I was definitely uninformed, but I don't consider myself stupid Smile

I was the valedictorian of my high school graduating class, earned a full-ride scholarship through college, and was selected outstanding graduating senior with my Bachelor's degree. Too often people lump "uninformed" and "stupid" under the header of "ignorant," which isn't the case.

Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2014 9:06 pm

Semi-identifying details here, because, as above, it was me.

I'm not greedy, nor stupid.

I was acting like a really decent individual when the respondant of my penpal ad declared love to me within two days. Poor chap, I thought. I am a bit individual in many ways, and he obviously thought I was some sort of dream. I went to a lot of effort to show to him that I wasn't really a dream woman. And that I was just looking for a new penpal.

He was very clever. Paid attention to everything I said, and adapted his words accordingly.

In the end, I didn't pay; but I was shaken by what had happened. As I hadn't been looking for a new love, I wasn't hurt, however. But what about those that had hoped for someone special? How would it be to them? And that's what started me baiting (and first with Romance lads) - to protect others.

Greedy? No. Ignorant? Well, only about scams. Not about life, which is why I continued talking to (what I thought was) the starry-eyed man.

I didn't even want a lover. But I still could have been a victim. If I'd had more money to spare.

Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2014 11:13 pm

1 - A good Friend of mine is probably getting Scammed right now because she is very naive. She paid two or three Microsoft Scammers and became a victim of identity theft on numerous occasions. There are others but you probably get the idea.

2 - A good friend and some of his friends Won a Lottery for the Deaf and one or two actually paid before I jumped in.

3 - My Sister's Facebook was hacked and 'She' sent out requests to all of her Friends for money as she was trapped in Europe. Some actually believed it but no money was ever sent.

4 - My Mother got caught up in the Grandparent Scam and was stopped by the Manager of WU from sending $5,000 to save one of her Babies.

Now I'm bitter. Best get Baiting!

Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2014 11:13 pm

A step removed from a good friend: his wife's brother got deeply hooked in an AFF scam. I don't know the format. He sent everything he had, then started borrowing from friends, family, credit cards, bank loans etc. to keep paying. My friend's wife smelled scam and wouldn't give him any money. By then all her siblings, and her parents, bought into the story and were deeply invested financially, loaning him money. She was ostracized by her entire family for being so "selfish" because she wouldn't help her brother, even though she was in a good financial position to do so.

You can guess the rest. Everyone lost everything. Her parents lost their farm, which had been in the family for generations.

Greedy? Hard to know. I never met the main victim, he may well have been. For the rest of the family, I suspect they were just trying to help him, not looking for a big payoff themselves. They were pure victims. Obviously the only one to come out okay was my friend's wife, but now the family continues to ostracize her out of embarrassment. She has never (to my knowledge) said "I told you so" but apparently the family is so devastated that they don't want to face her knowing she was right. (The parents have since died; this was about 7 years ago. Needless to say she got no inheritance.)

Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2014 11:37 pm

Best friend came to me this past summer and asked if I was still doing that "scammer" thing.. Very Happy

We have known each other since 16. His father passed away a little over 2 years ago and his Mom had discovered facebook.

You guessed it...Sgt. Lad was all over her. She would not listen to her children or family, so he asked if I could do something.

So I started dating her...

No, no , no...I did not, but I did warn her from scamwarners.com and directed her to the site.

That made her set up and take notice. She dropped him and recently got married, two weeks ago, to a real person.

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 2:10 am

My parents dropped about $15,000 in a Ponzi scheme a few years ago. The perpetrator was an acquaintance of my dad. They traveled to Phoenix and visited his firm, which took up the entire floor of a downtown high rise office building. This was impressive enough to make them get out their checkbook. Though my folks were able to absorb the the loss, their faith in humanity took a big hit. Happily, the perp was caught and is now doing time.

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 4:13 am

Ponzi schemes are in something of a different league from what we deal with, but they are certainly evil.

I worked for many years for a wonderful, very generous boss (at least to those employees he liked) whom I'm 100% certain was running a string of Ponzi schemes (and for a while, he also had an entire floor in the Transamerica bulding in San Francisco). He was a member of a high-end old-boys club, and had all kinds of "companies" which did nothing but take in money. At one point, as a bonus, he gave me a tiny interest in one such "factoring" company. It was pretty meaningless, aside from a nicely gold-embossed binder to hold all my (bogus) statements. When I was scrambling for money to buy my house I asked to sell my share. He politely claimed his wife was dying to get more shares and gave me the money. I didn't believe it for a second but I sure appreciated the cash at the time. I know it wasn't his wife's.

I truly liked the guy; still do (he's 94 now). But I was tremendously relieved when he made a major real estate coup and suddenly got a check for $5M. I've never seen a check for that kind of money before or since. He paid off all his "investors" and came out clean. All of the various investment companies shut down. I'm glad for him. He was just too nice a guy to go to jail, but I have absolutely no doubt that for several years he kept things going by juggling several Ponzi schemes, and my own salary was covered by them..................

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 6:32 am

My grandfather was very nearly taken in by a grandchild in trouble scam a few years ago. He got a call supposedly from his grandson who was in prison in Montreal and needed to be bailed out. My grandpa was ready to go to Western Union to send the money, but thankfully he no longer had a license and had to call my dad for a ride. My dad took him to get cash out (not knowing why he needed it or how much was being withdrawn) but when my grandpa asked my dad to take him to a Money Mart to use Western Union my dad demanded the full story, then called my cousin and had him talk to my grandpa to explain that he was neither in Montreal nor in prison.

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 7:06 am

A colleague of mine was selling his car and was preyed upon by an overpayment scammer who sent a bank draft for him to cash in. Of course the bank threw it out there and then and my colleague called the scammer back to tell him that if he ever called again he'd find him and rip out his giblets - an immensely satisfying practice, in my experience. So anyway, no money was lost. I'm also pleased to report that he fully supports my baiting efforts and enjoys the updates on Hector and Shorty. Was he ever greedy or stupid? I've never seen any evidence of it. He was just selling a car, after all.

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 9:04 am

I was on a dating site and someone in Udmurtia contacted me. We switched to Russian and I asked her to teach me some Udmurt, but she refused, saying the language is dangerous. I gradually figured out:
*She had no knowledge of English and was typing Russian into a translator, which produced singing polecats that she could not perceive.
*She said "Я никогда не был женат", which is the male form; therefore she's a he or an Udmurt. (Udmurt, like its relative Finnish, has no gender.)
*She claimed to have learned English and German and forgotten the German, implying that she remembered English, which she obviously didn't know.
*She switched to English after establishing that we could communicate better in Russian; therefore, she was talking with several men and forgot who knew Russian.
I told her I couldn't afford to fly to Udmurtia and never heard from her again.

I once got a message appearing to come from a friend, saying that he was in another country stranded. I called him, found out that he was at home, and told the other recipients.

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 9:48 am

Voted yes, and paid.

-Myself. Fell for a fake advert in a magazine claiming to be selling remote control tanks. They cleaned out my debit card. Got most of the money back, but still lost a bit. Never got the tank.

-My Dad. Romance scam, a New Zealand ladette. After a while he realised she was only using him to get into the UK.

-My Mother. She runs a B&B, almost fell for a CC scam (I recognised and stopped it before she payed out)

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 10:13 am

One family member fell for a number of scams, mostly of the multilevel marketing / HYIP / other investment sort (more ponzi type things as mentioned before).

He then got drawn into a Lotto scam that hit at the right moment when he was desperate to pay off debts (sigh, even paying into HYIP with credit card advances due to the promise of quick returns). He played all sorts of lotteries legal and not, and the lotto scam resembled the name of one he sometimes played (this is one reason they work).... paid about $800 then started bragging about his lottery win.

Sigh.

Fortunately we were able to get family members together and intervene, explaining why the Lotto win wasn't real and taking the time to tediously explain each and every "opportunity" that came into his inbox. He is still very much a likely victim & I would not be at all surprised if he has crept back into the world of dodgy investments. But at least he is still checking with us on anything that comes into his inbox (or spam box! sadly he finally discovered such a thing exists and snoops around it too, in case "anything important" shows up).

It did take some guts on his part to swallow his pride and admit that the lotto win he bragged to everyone about was just a confidence game. This is a huge obstacle to getting a victim out of trouble...

Also know a couple of people who got drawn into one of the Deaf adoption scams (scammer purports to represent parents of a deaf baby in a developing country, unable to raise the child and thus the child will face a miserable orphanage etc. Looking for a loving deaf family who might adopt & raise the child in a Deaf cultural, sign language environment). The fee paid in this case was an urgent "court fee" for an emergency custody case, supposedly if the birth parents did not appear the child would go into the orphanage with no possibility of appeal.

There were warning signs already, things were not quite making sense but the sense of urgency and the immediate wellbeing of the (imaginary) child was just too much. Not long after making the payment, they finally realised it was a scam - too many things didn't add up and ultimately they checked with certain authorities in the country in question which absolutely confirmed it was a scam.

And sadly there are more.... perhaps I hear a lot more about them because I profess an interest in internet scams and how they work, and I especially like to talk about the lesser known scams that don't really resemble the ones nearly everyone knows about these days.

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 10:22 am

The government department I worked for as a typist and telex operator many moons ago when they all had telex machines and typing pools received several very well done fake invoices for listings in several fake international directories. I knew they were fake but trying to convince my bosses I had nothing to do with these invoices or directories and that they were fake bombed miserably. Was given a severe reprimand (which was also placed on my personnel file) and put on probation for 3 months as if I were a new employee. Was very close to losing my job over the incident. Scams were not widely known about at the time unfortunately Crying or Very sad

.

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:00 am

An attorney I know who does a lot of collection work, was taken in by one of the debt collection scammers. The attorney received the check, deducted his fee and transferred the balance. The check was a fake and he was forced to pay the difference.

A court reporter I know had her phone email hi jacked for the "Help we are stranded in Cancun" scam. I called her and she had her service termonated.

Sadly a family member was taken in by a perfectly legal sweepstakes scam-she must have spent over $10,000 buying products thinking she was going to win the grand prize. We had to redirect her mail.

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:44 am

Friend of my Ex-Wife's. Originally scammed by a bad check I found out last summer. She came to visit me because she feared she was being scammed again. She claimed she had actually spent a month with her scammer and his two Kids in Texas. I googled the address she gave me. It had been sold in the last year for 2.5 million and the photos of the house looked nothing like the house she had photos of. She had documented where she had transferred money for her scammer in the neighborhood of $18,000. Her Scammer was asking her to Buy PPL flowers and wanted her to call people pretending to be his secretary.

I profiled her scammer at SS:
http://www.scamsurvivors.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=13440&p=37359&hilit=not+going+to+believe+this#p37359

I was thinking about her and was wondering if anyone ever does anything about these Pricks when I found this site.

Baiting Guru Joined: 19 Mar 2007 Posts: 2628

It was years ago and in various ways led me to this site.
It was my mum who was intended victim, it may have been a cheque scam. I can't really remember all the details, she's no longer around to ask.
She was convinced they'd know where she lived and would turn up on her doorstep.
I found out from here I could set up another email address(I didn't know about googlemail way back then ) I told Mum to forward any more emails to me and took care of it. ( mum forwarded and I ignored till they went away but she felt there was something active being done )

It was before scamwarners

From this site I was given good advice.
First of all how to keep safe, not bait back in anger if they had anything personal.
Thank you to the mods
I was talked through how to trace headers, got answers to all my newbie questions even it was the nth time of asking
In turn I have educated my children who can spot scams, phishing and most fake sites a mile off
I now straight bait as confused little old lady, although it makes my blood boil how they can attack someone so vulnerable.
(Until I get the bank details to pass on to Alan)

Master of Master Baiters Joined: 11 Jan 2014 Posts: 688

A friend of mine, devastated after a divorce following twenty odd years of marriage, sent money to a lovely Nigerian Doctor, took her kids in the middle of the night to the Airport to meet his flight, he wasn't on it surprisingly enough as his mother had taken ill. Phew at least he was a Doctor!

She sent him money again!

She told me about it after the two occasions. There was not a third I am pleased to say.

Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2014 4:15 am

My sister sent her rent money to Nigeria. "I thought he was nice."

Then my bank account was 'pinged' for $.15. Yes, fifteen cents. The looting started. Dell gift cards to the tune of $400. I went to the bank and met with the manager, saying "Look at this." He referred it to their oh-so-efficient "fraud department" who thought I was the fraud. I gave them a talking to.

Eventually I got my money back but got angry that anyone should ever endure this. As a result, I don't bait, I sitekill. Show me a fake bank, and I'm all over it.

*** BANNED *** Joined: 26 Jul 2012 Posts: 1116

Yours truly was once scammed trying to buy some electronics online. The seller looked legit enough, good ratings and a long time in the market. Turns out their ebay account was hacked out and I never got that laptop.

Happens. Paypal made it all manner of hell to get the cash back and I never did due to the headache it was. It was a low amount, and now I never buy electronics online or use paypal..... which as a techie is sometimes hard. Laughing

Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2014 4:38 pm

I was had, sometime in the late nineties. I was cold called by a company in the Dominican republic. They sent me a beautifully constructed and expensive looking brochure. Needless to say I bought shares. From then on they called me every other week telling me how these shares had rocketed and were about to go sky-high, I bought more shares.

When it came time for me to want to sell them, I was told that I only had (EG. I can't remember exact details) 12.5K shares and they were only ever marketed by the 25K, so I invested more, to enable me to sell.

They stopped calling me. I called them to instruct them to sell my shares and was told that "the employee who managed your account stole all those shares" and that he had been sacked, and the money was gone.

I was so frustrated, I asked to speak to the manager, again and again. I sent them photocopies of the share certificates, they told me they were worthless, and as far as they were concerned I had done no business with them.

They then again tried to sell me more shares - this is when I just hung up on them every time. I felt betrayed and helpless to do anything, their website then soon disappeared, and their phone number stopped being valid.

Not long after this I found Shivver's posts - long before there was a forum attached, it made me realise I was not alone.

Eventually I got around to joining what became Eater, and had a little payback, closing a few dozen sites, and collecting piggies, and straight baiting. It felt so good.

I spend much of my time at ScamWarners now, tracking down specific scammers and their ID's, publishing them so they can potentially protect other people from becoming victims.

I'm looking forward to getting back to baiting proper, when the time allows.

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2014 1:58 am

A family friend telephoned and asked to borrow money. I asked what was it for and received an elusive answer. I insisted she come to see me in person to talk about why she needed money, and the story came out. Advanced Fee Fraud. She had sent one substantial payment, was being pressured for more. Fortunately she didn't have any more to send and she was looking to borrow it. If she had the money she would have sent it. I recognized it for what it was and began the process to convince her. I asked another friend, who is in law enforcement, to help and together we convinced her that her money was gone. We told her to have no further contact. The scammer(s) she was involved with had advanced skills and began threatening her using spoofed email accounts pretending to be local law enforcement, the FBI etc. They tried to convince her she was being investigated for money laundering. It was hard for her to cut off the contact and even harder to admit she had been fooled.

Then I found this group. Six years later, with several extended breaks, I am still doing my best to frustrate as many lads as I have time and energy for. The lads cannot grasp the concept of what we do. That is their Achilles heel. Why would someone spend this much time if they were not serious? They do not know the fire that burns in those of us that have been touched by their criminal and immoral ways. We have seen firsthand the damage that they do. Law enforcement is largely ineffective in this arena but we are not. Fight the good fight fellow baiters!

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2014 8:40 pm

<-----Victim of a romance scammer.

Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2014 9:13 pm

Had a patient who gave a lot of money to a 419 scammer. She lost her home and was forced into a convalescent center. She had mild dementia and the scammer just took total advantage of that.

And in Sacramento CA not to long ago a 419 scammer was actually picked up wile hitching a ride and scammed an elderly couple out of $10,000. Animal predators. I hate to think what may have happened if they had figured it out and tried to get him out of the car. Most confidence scammers are not violent but who knows?

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