Hold onto your money friends!
No matter how often you warn them, people will usually never fully listen.
The amount of time I've seen people waste in line for scratch offs alone, tells you all you need to know.
But it's time to wise up.
Don't let yourself be swindled.
Redditor wa8808 wanted to discuss all the ways we're being bamboozled by asking how to spot the signs:
"What's a scam that people think isn't a scam?"
It's always good to know how to the scammers.
BBB
Wall Street Friends GIF by Imagine DragonsGiphy"That the Better Business Bureau is part of the government and doesn't have any power to resolve fraud and other issues, rather than what it is. Which is a private marketing firm."
boofaceleemz
Ingredients
"Supplements or drinks that remove 'toxins' from your body. Your body already does that."
urbexcemetery
"Especially the ones with stuff like activated charcoal, which can mess with your ability to absorb a myriad of actual prescription medicines."
smollest_snek
"My relatives got super into MLM cleanses that remove toxins. They kept pushing really hard for me to try them."
"I looked up the ingredients and 1/3 were known carcinogens. The best part is they kept saying how I was full of toxins. To give you context, at that point I was drinking filtered water, growing almost all my food in my organic permaculture food forest, avoiding driving and cities when possible, etc. They were doing: alcohol, cigarettes, fast food, prescription painkillers recreationally, etc."
BaylisAscaris
Playing with coins...
"The auction websites where items apparently sell for WAY under market value. Like a PS5 going for $5. The thing is, you do actually pay $5 for a PS5 if you win, that's not the scam."
"The scam is that you have to pay for bids. You'll buy a set of bids for say $50. Then you'll just never win a bidding war or it'll take way more bids than you thought it would."
"I'm sure the websites themselves have fake users that are guaranteed to win, as well, so it's just farming bids, which is farming your money."
"If you get hooked, just like any other type of gambling, they will ring you for thousands and thousands of dollars in bids, while you 'win' nowhere near that value of the bids."
Patsfan618
Gauge it...
"High end speaker cables. To be able to afford to put silver in them, they make the gauge really small. Wire gauge is the biggest decider of how much signal gets to the speaker (resistance in ohms) and how different the signal is from the original (distortion). The truth is that going from 22 gauge (what a lot of snake oil cable companies use) to 16 gauge."
"Which isn't even that thick, but definitely enough for most in home cable runs) is going to have waaaaay more of an effect on resistance, and as a result distortion, than going from a really conductive (copper) to a slightly more really conductive (silver) material inside the cables."
clyspe
Make you money
Curb Your Enthusiasm Bingo GIF by Jason ClarkeGiphy"Those bingo games that supposedly 'make you money.' When I worked at Taco Bell, two of my managers would always play those kind of games. In order to win you have to pay for currency to use in order to play bingo… they were paying $20 to win $5."
GuideSad2361
I'll never stop playing Bingo! Scam or not.
Pay it Forward
Schitts Creek Do Not Want GIF by CBCGiphy"Send me 50 bucks and I will send you a list of all the scams out there."
Good_Swordfish_3736
"Sorry, I can't send money now, because the bank needs 500 dollars to unlock the 500,000 dollars I inherited. If you send me 500 dollars, I can pay you!"
Batavijf
Look Up Doc
"Vision Insurance. It is an eye doctor coupon you pay for in advance to get your one discount to use each year to bring inflated prices back to normal."
shazwazzle
"So random trick we do at the eye doctor. We tell them we don’t have insurance, they then give you store discounts. Then I just submit the receipt for reimbursement to my insurance."
"My daughters contacts and appointment this year I was only out of pocket $17 after I got the insurance check. Only catch is you have to be able to pay the cost up front, and wait 4-6 weeks for reimbursement. If I would have used my insurance in the store my total was like $120 after insurance. Super weird."
Awkward-Train1584
Used Data
"Any guarantee or purchase that ends with 'unlimited.'"
"As Scotty would say in Star Trek 'you canna break the laws of physics.'"
karo_scene
"Found this one out with my unlimited 4G turns out when I used over 2TB of data I got an angry message to knock it off. (To be fair I was using my phone as a hotspot for like 5 people for a month long while we were on vacation... lol)."
CMDR-Serenitie
Fortune
"Plenty of these 'super investment guru' ads in the Internet (if not all)."
GabThePretto"
"I have here the key to that treasure chest, inside is a vast fortune, but I could open it myself, but instead I'm going to sell the key to you for but a pittance."
"This scam hasn't changed since the dawn of money, yet people fall for it in every epoch dressed up in a different dollar store Halloween costume."
McCheeseTruther
"When the gold rush hit, the vast majority of people digging for gold didn’t make the money. The people selling the shovels did."
HeyYoPaul
Love Search
Sad Talk To Me GIF by SpongeBob SquarePantsGiphy"Those 'courses' that are meant to teach sad lonely dudes to pick up women."
anxiousjellybean
Beware the scam. They're everywhere!