Absurd Alhazred posted:

That's weird, though; I mean, the money still gets put into their account, so it's easy to trace where it went. Yeah, you're implicated, but so are they.

Der Luftwaffle posted:

My favourite has always been the guys selling X out of the back of their truck, usually AV equipment. Offering ludicrous deals on garbage in expensive boxes with the veil of dubious legality that used to draw people in like flies.

I thought they'd died out but a year ago I was flagged down by a guy claiming to be coming back from a jobsite with a bunch of extra projectors that "no one would miss". Of course the story falls apart when you try to check out the equipment or arrange a later meetup since you're not carrying cash. Points for tenacity I guess.

cumshitter posted:

A couple years back I was driving home from work and pulled off at a gas station to refill my tank. This couple, guy and girl, see me in my office clothes and probably assumed I had money for them. Just as I open the door the guy runs up and places himself on the other side, not allowing me to open it further than half a foot. Then they both start shouting contradictory statements at me nonstop.

"We're not from here we're lost!"

"We live right down the street!"

"We're starving can you please help?"

"We just ate at El Pollo Loco!"

etc., etc. This goes on for several minutes, my brain is a bit fuzzy from working all day and having this nonsense sprung on me so I just continue looking at them without saying anything. The guy is asking for gas money at this point, and trying to shove his iPhone in my hand while saying that if I think he's lying I can hold on to his iPhone until he pays me back (which I'm sure he'd locate using the app and then extort me into paying him to not call the police, if I had taken it). So alarm bells are going off in my head and there's plenty of gas stations left on my way home. So I tell them to call 411 and ask for a free gallon of gas and drive off.

Xander77 posted:

I've been told that certain scummy telemarketing job offers work the same way, but this is the first time I've encountered it:

Work for our company, doing customer support for MLM scheme advertising ("Solo ads", sorry if I'm simplifying this needlesly complex bullshit) for two-three months. You're going to work 7 days a week, for 80% of what a regular minimum wage job pays. Once you've passed your probation period, you'll get a cut of our overall sales revenue, and earn approximately 3-4000$ a month.

Which... wouldn't be so surprising, if they weren't looking specifically for someone well educated with exceptional English skills, and didn't make me go through an incredibly elaborate interview process.

Edit - something I always wanted to try:

Someone's running a shell game in front of a crowd. You play, loudly announce that the shell is in the middle (or whatever, doesn't actually matter) and flip the other two cups yourself before conman can. Both cups are empty, so obviously the ball must be in the middle one. Do people try that? What happens if/when they do?

Xander77 posted:

As a very deep and not at all worn out metaphor, every aspect of American capitalism is "like a shell game" where you direct peoples attention to a distraction, then pocket their money just when they think they have a chance to win. In other ways, I don't really see the similarity.
Good for you? Not actually familiar with the game (one of the reasons I never tried the idea above, besides natural timidity, is that street-cons like that aren't very popular in Israel), but what would you do / have done if someone tried the trick above? Seems like exactly the sort of semi-clever thing a bunch of drunken frat boys would pull?

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

most people will do just about anything to avoid starting a physical confrontation, which is something a whole lot of grifts count on, although a frathouse seems like the very worst possible place to try it

Captain Cool posted:

If you wait long enough you might get lucky. The US government, with other governments and universities and private companies, took down the original cryptolocker servers and recovered most of the keys: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-leads-multi-national-action-against-gameover-zeus-botnet-and-cryptolocker-ransomware

The FTC says you shouldn't interact with the call at all. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0108-national-do-not-call-registry#unwanted There's a system called nomorobo that won the FTC's challenge to stop these robocalls, but they never supported my cell phone carrier and now it looks like they only do VOIP for some reason.

You can try putting the "disconnected" SIT tones on your voicemail. That helped me for a little while.

I report these calls to donotcall.gov. They come and go. I've gotten 3-4 a week before, but I haven't had one in the last few months.

Avalanche posted:

There's been quite a few scams being run at my university to the point where running into one is almost a daily ritual.

5) Study Abroad in TURKEY over the summer! Only $1975! round trip all expenses paid!"

I really don't know what the gently caress this entails, I don't want to know, and I have no idea how the gently caress this has not been shut down yet other than the fact that even the most gullible of all people have no interest in ever going to Turkey.

Xander77 posted:

I'm translating a contract (despite having no accounting experience) and had to find proper translations for some accounting terms.

A bit of googling told me that the presence of terms like "Rolls and extensions" "Operative documentary letter of credit" and "International banking hours" (yes, I'm serious) probably means something scammy is going on, but none of the sources I found provided any details about the actual substance of the scam.

So... what is / could be the scam involved?

Also... should I alert my client? I'm not actually sure which side drafted the contract though.

Swingline posted:

A common scam at least here in NYC is free teeth whitening cold calls to office worker phone lines. Sketchy dental practices figure out a company's phone # and has a call center dial every single extension. They say something along the lines of "Congratulations, we've partnered up with [your company] to offer a free teeth whitening session to employees!!!". Turns out that either 1) the teeth whitening isn't really free and is actually hundreds of dollars, or 2) its a "free teeth whitening" that is actually bundled with 4 very expensive additional sessions that you unwittingly agree to in the small print of something they have you sign. And of course in reality they have no affiliation with your company at all. This scam preys on naive 20-somethings who think that now that they have a real job that they're some big shot who will get free perks thrown at them.

MisterOblivious posted:

Sanford posted:

One of our highly qualified and experienced technical support team, last week. He opened an attachment called details.odt.zip and totally shagged his system to the point that it was just quicker to re-image the disks. At least now I have an answer when they ask why our dev environment is totally separate and locked down.

Lutha Mahtin posted:

I've seen this (in the US) a number of times. Every time I've seen it, it's looked like a scam. I once was drinking a beer at a restaurant's sidewalk patio, and a dude who approached me eventually pointed out that he was still wearing his work badge from his new job, then ask if I could buy him a beer. Pretty solid ask, right? Except that the badge was a real lovely hand-laminated thing, and he said it was for working at the Salvation Army, an organization which I think is almost totally run by volunteers.

Mister Kingdom posted:

I got one the other day and I told them I had a 1905 Ford Model T. It took her a second to ask, "Do you any cars we can cover?"

I said, "Nope. That's my only car."

She said, "Well, have a nice day."

Volmarias posted:

You're missing out on hate loving a telemarketer here

Weatherman posted:

Racist, sexist, and homophobic ones.