What's the worst scam you've fallen for (or gotten close to falling for)?

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.

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."

When I was younger, like 15/16, I was working a job in a stone quarry during my spring break. Long days, hot sun but all cash and made decent money.

One of my neighbors whom I would briefly speak to all the time wanted to borrow some money. I think it was $400 or something. At that age, I wanted to help out and I wanted seem cool, so I lent it. He asked for a bit more and more and eventually it ended up to about $1100. My neighbor said their paycheck was coming 'next week' and could easily pay me back.

Next week never came. I followed up with the neighbor and they said something happened to their paycheck but the money was coming. He then said a showing of good faith, he'd give me his payslip as proof and that I needed to get it back to him so I he cash he check. Stupid me knew something to was up but because I was naiive and impressionable, I told him I trusted him and I'll await the money.

I managed to get his number and I called to follow up again, but he had some girl answer the phone and when I asked to speak to him, she said, "Oh he's getting cookies right now..."

A week later the phone was disconnected and then I didn't see him for a while. I then moved out of the neighborhood.

Eventually I saw him a few years later and mentioned about the money that he owed me but he 'wasn't sure what I was talking about'. I long since before then realized the money was gone. Expensive lesson but that's a story of how I got scammed.

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.

When I was 16 I looked a bit older, so people would often assume I was over 18.

I was in Boston one day wandering around and I was approached by someone who wanted to give me a free personality test or something. He was handsome and I was a young gay boy so I figured why not?

It ended up being a scientology recruitment. They freaked and stopped trying to hard sell me their book when I told them I was 16. And their recruitment video had me laughing like crazy as I walked out.

I didn't know how crazy of a cult they are at the time. But it was a funny experience.

In a trains station gave someone enough money for a ticket cuz he was claiming that he lost his train. Felt real stupid when I saw him the next day asking the same shit.

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.

Years ago, I bought headphones that were ¼ of the price of the big name Bose and Sony's and provided at least ¾ the experience. When I wore them so much they eventually broke years later, I purchased some more from their website. Turns out they have been taking orders and haven't been delivering products. Their Facebook page still posts ads and the comments are people talking about how it was a scam. That's $170 dollars I won't get back. It's weird because I really liked their product and had no reason to think they would suddenly stop delivering. Very strange.

Brand is Cowin, by the way.

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.

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."

Edit: Its not really a pyramid scheme... They just do everything they can to weasel out of giving you your paycheck on payday and because it's sales commission, I don't think they have to follow minimum wage laws since you're not paid hourly.

Unless they've seriously changed how it fundamentally works (this was when I was 18). They never encouraged or paid extra for getting others to sell for you, like a typical MLM thing.

I went to buy Norton Antivirus. (This was... probably almost 25 years ago?) I went to https://symantic.com/. The correct domain name was https://symantec.com. ("e" vs "i").

https://symantic.com/ went to a page owned by... I think it was Avast. But the page was (in retrospect) very obviously meant to look like it was made by Symantec/Norton. It had images of cardboard boxes like software CDs used to come in and such, in exactly the Norton yellow/orange.

I went through their purchase funnel and installed Avast before I realized it wasn't Norton. As soon as I realized it, I immediately uninstalled it. I don't remember if I found any way to contact Avast, but I did call the credit card company and contested the charge. Avast contested the... con...test..ment...? I appealed and Avast gave up.

And I bought Norton.

Years ago I was approached by a guy in a suit while working my shitty retail job. He was trying to recruit me to a pyramid scheme. I knew what was going on from the get go and just wanted to do a morbid curiosity suicide burn on it. Met him for an "interview" at a Starbucks and gave me like 10 CDs with talks from their independent business owners(lol) talking about how great it is and how much money they are making. He later invited me to a meeting at a hotel where they had a guy give a speech about the schtick in the conference hall with interviews played on a projector of success stories in tropical mansions.

I felt like, but don't know, that I might have been the only person there who knew what was going on. I talked to a few people who were also being recruited and they didnt seem to see what was going on. There were a lot of people there that really drank the Kool aid and had their dreams of not living paycheck to paycheck taken advantage of.

The guy who recruited me sat down with his wife, myself and another recruit and wanted to get us all signed up. I told him I didn't want to join a pyramid scheme. He tried to explain to me how it wasn't a pyramid scheme. I "wanted to get things straight" and drew a diagram on a napkin of the company structure, he confirmed my understanding was correct, I drew a triangle around it. The other recruit figured it out. The guy was trying to make me feel bad about not understanding how big of an opportunity I was throwing away, it did not work.

All the products they sold were crap. I looked at their website and couldn't find fuckall that I or anyone would actually want to buy if they weren't compelled to by being involved.

If you ever get someone trying to get you to do a pyramid scheme and they have one of those conference hall talks, do it if it is free just so you can enjoy the spectacle of con-men working in the open.

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

Student loans for in-person university. I'll be paying for that for a long time.

Eventually dropped out and finished my degree with WGU. I highly recommend that for anyone considering a college degree. I was able to finish with PELL grants so I added no debt and have a degree

I emailed the bonsai kitty guy when I was like 10 to tell him how mean he was.

This absolute bastard said he would give a rune platebody to the person that traded him the highest value item as a sign of trust... lost a DDP++ to that jerk.

Which sounds like a joke, but that was a real eye-opening experience for 8 year old me. Enough that 20+ years later I still reflect on it on an almost daily basis, to remind myself that if something seems like a bleedingly obvious scam it invariably is.

Not really fallen for, but at some point you don't really have a choice. So in Bali near the waterfalls you sometimes have these people who claim to work for some official company asking for the entrance fee, but of course they don't. But are you gonna just say no and keep on driving to save like 2,50 bucks when 2 burly guys are telling you to stop?

Fucking herbalife. Not necessarily because I thought it was worth a damn, but to help a friend that thought it was worth a damn. I didn't commit because I had this niggling doubt that it would be helping them to essentially waste good money to give them a "start" in something they were determined to try and make work.

Told them to let me think on it, and reckoned that backing a scam "business" in any way wouldn't benefit them at all. Told them a polite version of that, and the number of people I already knew that had tried it and done nothing but get deeper in debt and more broke. Actually convinced them to cut their losses and move on, which was a surprise.

I've been fairly lucky about only running into scams either after I'd already heard about them, or when I wasn't desperate enough to go for it despite the risks of how it was presented. The whole Nigerian Prince thing, as an example. The first time I ran across it, it seemed like a really bad idea, if it was legitimate at all, and I wasn't desperate enough to risk anything for hope. It wasn't long before it became known as a scam for sure, so the next time I got one of those emails, not only was I aware, but the second email would have shown or to be a scam what with being from an entirely different email address and not saying anything about following up.

I received a friendship request on Facebook from a friend, picture matched, 30 common friends, so I accepted. Next day he wrote me, that he was sick of strep, but now is fine, I said sorry, then he asked "have you applied for the NEH government fund? they help people that do social labor". As I do some kind of social labor I asked what was that, he asked me to contact the NEH official, this second guy asked my address to check if I was a potential receiver, I gave my address, he said "yes, you can apply" please send me this filled form. I got suspicious, went back and asked my friend "have you contacted Rose again? the consultant we met at Berlin?". He answered, "no, no further contact with her". We have never been together in Berlin or known any Rose. So, I reported the fake account to facebook, contacted my friend and let him know about the fake so he can also report it, and adviced him to notify the other 30 common friends on the list.

Nice idea, scammers! Weeding out what works and doesn't with this feedback! But it won't work on meeeeeee

Moving into a new neighborhood with my girlfriend. We each lived in different parts of town and worked different schedules, so each arranged for separate moves. I had just finished unloading my stuff. Friendly neighbor walked over to say hello. We started chatting. Nice guy.

At some point, he mentioned something about having to head home for a pizza party. Checked his wallet and he was short. We all know where this is heading so I'll skip to the end. It only cost me $40. Never saw him again.

Lesson learned.

I was a teenager and sold an old iPod Touch on eBay, first time I’d ever sold anything on there. The buyer reached out and told me she wanted to mail straight to her son who was deployed in Nigeria. I didn’t know any better, so I put it in the mail. As soon as I did, they cancelled the order, and I had no recourse. Of course eBay was no help. Ruined my day, for sure, but in the grand scheme of things, not a huge price to pay to learn that lesson.

My RuneScape account got rinsed because of my teenage stupidity in the early 2000's, learned a very valuable lesson and haven't been scammed since.

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.

So one summer while me and my cousin were broke and bored, we decided to pimp out her feet as she has crazy long toes and apparently some foot fetish dudes enjoy that niche.

I set up an Instagram, we decided that I would be the manager and media representative (AKA answer the messages on the account for her) and she would provide the goods (long toes)

One dude started messaging the account praising her toes and I would of course be as courteous as possible. Soon enough we got him to place an order. Only problem was, he only used cashapp to send money, something not available in our country, which should have stopped us initially but we tried finding a workaround.

Where we (or I) fucked up? He said he wanted to see the video before sending any money.

I, a dumbass, sent the video.

Never heard back from him.

Thankfully the video wasn't even of significant production value (very clearly an amateur job) and the only thing sacrificed was the dignity of my cousin's toes.

Safe to say that discouraged us and we haven't attempted to do that again since.

Couple years ago I won a scholarship to a college in Germany, for the carreer I had always wanted to work in but couldn't practice it, as it just doesn't exist in local colleges. I was born and bred in the third world, and still live here; I thought my luck was finally turning around. I'd be able to maybe have a better future, doing what I really wanted instead of just what I was good at.

One night as I was overthinking ish, I decided to look for everything relevant about the college. It was a scam college. No certifications, and the owners had recently been in hot waters due to money laundering. I had everything ready to hop on a plane.

Capitalism

A few decades ago I got a letter (snail-mail even) that my domain was expiring soon and asking if I wanted to continue. I signed into the link given and paid a small amount, only to realize I hadn't even registered my domain with that registrar in the first place. I locked my domain to prevent a transfer, but obviously the money were lost.

In high school, i was watching a movie online free and got a popup from the FBI. I panicked and closed instead of paying the $99. After the panic cooled, I was so glad my panic response is running away. Clearly a spam popup

In the early 2000s, I bought a book for someone from amazon.com. I'd had good experiences with Amazon a few years earlier in the late 90s when it worked like a normal store - you pay Amazon and they send you the book you ordered. Little did I know that Amazon had since become a 'marketplace' where they let any old scammer list, take your money, and not send anything. After a couple of months with no book arriving, luckily I was able to charge back and get the money back from the bank.

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.

I'm still waiting for my $1000 from Bill Gates for passing on his e-mail :(

To my eternal shame, that really happened. I was young, gullible and stupid..
I guess there are worse ways to learn not to be so trusting.

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.

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 had a scam that netted me in no change in money whatsoever.

These scammers offer you this "you'll rate these stuff on sites and we'll give you money", after completing a first batch and they give you some money, they'll try to get the victim to believe they are legit. After believing that you're trusting them enough, they pull the ponzi card "for next missions pay us 30-1000$ amount; you'll recieve double after doing them".

I got 30$ from them in total so I sent 30$ knowing it was a scam to see what they would do; of course they blocked me. I was expecting them to try to get more money out of me, appearently they're satisfied with getting their bait back.

Many years ago, before I'd heard of the Nigerian prince scam, someone emailed me asking for help to transfer 180 million out of an African country. I had no reason to think this wasn't a genuine (if slightly dodgy) foreign national trying to involve random internet weirdos in a scheme to raid his country's treasury.

I wrote back saying "sorry, wrong address" because I ain't fuckin' with Inland Revenue.

I learned about Pump and Dump the hard way. 🤷‍♂️

When I was switching careers I looked into one of the IT schools. They looked nice and promised me a decent job with decent pay. In exchange, I'd need to pay a percentage of my future salary. I said ok, and signed the papers.

Little did I know they offered a course that was available for free and "exams" that were conducted by students that have finished one chapter more. Saw a lot of bullying and left this mess before finishing it without paying a dime.

Got a job that actually lied in between the career I pursued previously and the career that was offered by this "school". In some sense they've helped me, and to this day I'm ashamed that I haven't paid them anything.

I also took an airport taxi that costed me ten times a usual cost.

Pig butchering romance scam on Tinder. Matched with a pretty girl. Our conversation felt genuine. Even had a short video call. But things were feeling a bit too good to be true, but I went on to see where things were going.

Saw through the scam once she started offering helping with cryptocurrency investment, so I didn’t lose anything.

My mother-in-law straight up bought the Nigerian Prince scam hook, line and sinker.

1. Bought a timeshare in Vegas. Never used it. Paid the mortgage and maintenance fees for a few years then said fuckem and just stopped. Such a scam. They went out of business during the 2008 recession and it eventually fell off of our credit reports.
2. Sold cutco knives in college (MLM). Perfectly fine product but overpriced and they basically get you pester all of your family and friends. I paid for the sample products myself. Made the biggest sale to my parents. Mostly just embarrassing.
3. I bought speakers out a van like some other commenters. Probably paid too much, they sounded good and I used them for at least 10 years.

got a phone call that I owed money on some loan that I had taken out like 10 years earlier. they had enough information correct to make me actually believe I might have done it (I'm a former junkie, and did a lot of dumb fucking things to get money, plus decent sized holes in my memory).

I was planning on doing research before sending money, but as soon as I explained exactly how the conversation had gone to a friend of mine, they were like "that's a scam". and as soon as they set it, it was so fucking obvious too.

I'm a lot less inclined to make fun of people who get phished or social engineered

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.

Rush my passport by FedEx. I usually never get scammed but I assumed FedEx, at an in person location, wouldn't just rob you.

Thankfully I was able to get my 1k$ back by doing some extremely convoluted shit on reddit.

Had a lapse of judgement once and sent one of those 2FA passcodes sent to me via SMS to a shady guy on Craigslist. This was back when 2FA was still in the process of becoming ubiquitous, I do not believe I had seen one before that point.

I believe the only thing it allowed them to do was register a Google Talk number in my account's name. I immediately dissociated my account from the number after this interaction (strangely, you could not actually cancel the number, only disown it, so I guess the scammer still got what they wanted anyway) and changed my account password for good measure.

I've also bought many bootleg collectors items off of Ebay. Though, each time I've done so was fully knowing the listings were lying, and still wanting the bootleg garbage anyway.

Shortly after turning 18 I was offered a commission job selling Kirby vacuum cleaners with a fairly large guaranteed weekly pay. I product was high quality and the people interviewing were calm, well mannered and assured that we would absolutely not be using any pressure tactics for the sales.

Day 1 we're taught about how to demo the machine and get to tag along for a couple scheduled sales

Day 2 we're taught how to pressure entry into a home for door to door sales demos...

Day 7-ish a friend of the boss joins the group who is super high pressure and boss gets excited to immediately move that direction

After 2 weeks it was clear that this was exactly the opposite of what I'd signed up for (including the lack of guaranteed pay) so I left in search of something better.

I once changed power company based on a phone seller (stupid, I know).

They were promising all kinds of savings but in the end they ended up costing MORE than my previous one AND make it almost impossible to get out of the fraudulent deal.

I eventually managed to get out of it though, and since they pissed off a shitload of other people too, that company doesn't do business in my country at all anymore. And of course I've hung up on every telemarketer since then.

Online bartending school. I cancelled after 5 minutes of reflection.

Two I can think of, luckily neither was that bad.

Firstly I got impatient and bought a new DSLR camera kit off eBay, thinking I would save money and get a good deal. It came with two decent lenses, supposedly, and a bunch of other accessories. Very highly rated seller.

After I made the purchase, I get a message to expect a phone call from such-and-such number. Strange, I thought. They call and immediately I can tell it's a bait-and-switch. They tell me what they're going to send, but it's not what was in the listing. Only one lens, instead of two, and some other shenanigans like substituting inferior brands and cheap shit. I called them out and said either you deliver what was promised in the listing, or I'm opening a dispute, and it won't be a good look that you tried to change the deal over the phone.

Anyway I got what was listed, but overall it was a disappointment. Grey market items from overseas, not official US licensed gear, so I had no warranty. But I ended up paying as much or more than if I had walked into a local shop. It wasn't counterfeit, but just left a bad taste in my mouth. The seller disappeared from eBay not long after that...

Second time: I received one of those emails with a password in the subject. It looked familiar, and was in fact an (old) password I had used. Someone took a hacked DB and just fired off countless emails with the passwords to the matching email addresses. But the tone of the email was what spooked me. It said, I have had full access to all your emails, I have figured out how to reset accounts and hacked into your webcam and have some very interesting photos. Either you pay this amount to this bitcoin address or I send the photos to all your contacts and your life will be ruined.

In the moment, I panicked like oh shit this is legit. Even though I couldn't imagine what photos they referred to, it was still scary being blackmailed. I thought about it, discussed with some people, and they helped calm me down. After a few days, I realized it must be a scam. It was so generic. Surely if it was real, they would mentioned specifics... my name, or what I looked like, or some other unmistakable details.

Over the years, I received a number of other variations with the same jist, and different passwords (my email address was in several major leaks in mid-2000s). I'm glad I didn't fall for that shit, regardless of how serious it seemed in the moment.

The American Dream.

One of those near-number ones where you're trying to call customer service and you get a scam instead. Something about a free cruise. Fortunately I came to my senses, the operator was very slick and kept redirecting me away from things that would make me think twice.

I believed in the American system and government

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 :⁠-⁠(