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Swingline posted:A common scam at least here in NYC is free teeth whitening cold calls to office worker phone lines. Teeth whitening seems to be an inherently scammy business. I saw a bunch of really highly rated products on Amazon and all seemed good... until one honest person took a photo of the packaging it arrives in that stated clearly "Give us a 5* review on Amazon, and we'll send you another set of teeth whiteners for free!".
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Apr 17, 2016 17:52
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Isn't that illegal or at least against Amazon TOS?
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Apr 17, 2016 17:58
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RenegadeStyle1 posted:Isn't that illegal or at least against Amazon TOS? Not until someone at Amazon who cares finds out.  But I mean, it's not like scamming people in general is legal.
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Apr 17, 2016 18:00
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RenegadeStyle1 posted:Isn't that illegal or at least against Amazon TOS? You'd think so, but I found a variant of the one I'm talking about with this pointed out in 2014 and it's still up. https://imgur.com/a/kDYHg Maybe the small-ish print is enough to cover their rear end? But it pretty much implies they want the 5* review. I couldn't find the 'give us 5 and get another one free' one, perhaps that one was pulled.
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Apr 17, 2016 18:55
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I've had sellers straight up send me Amazon gift cards for 5 star reviews. They didn't ask beforehand, though.
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Apr 17, 2016 21:14
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This story is a rehash from an old thread I had about hustling dummies at the pool table. I learned everything I know about pool hustling from my uncle. We use to run cons in dive bars all over the place all the time when we were on the road hustling. This is my favorite con that we use to pull because it worked almost every time. My uncle would drop me off at this dive bar and I would walk in and bring my pool stick and just start shooting. Get a few drinks, shoot around, ask some people to shoot for drinks and start a very good repor with the bar. Hopefully I could get some people to who were interested in shooting pool. We would shoot friendly games for drinks and I would make sure to never lose and just keep winning and showing my best moves. After a an hour or 2 or maybe 3 depending on how things are going Frank walks in. Frank is a master at acting drunk so much so that he has fooled me a few times just to get me to drive home. So he walks in already drunk and he sits down at the bar and starts drinking and making sure everyone there can hear him talk. He is loud, obnoxious, annoying and just a straight up rear end in a top hat. After he has had a few drinks he will walk over and just watch me shoot. He starts poo poo talking my pool play and telling me what I am doing wrong and we get into a little discussion that turns into pissing contest. I tell him to grab a stick and lets play for some drinks, he laughs and says he only plays for money. I tell him I don't gamble for money like that and I eventually walk away from the table and sit at the bar. He grabs the stick and starts shooting and proclaiming that he is the best everyone is afraid him and that sort of thing. Now the regulars are getting mad because he has ruined the good vibe in the bar I had going. I get mad and tell him to cool it no one wants to hear his bullshit. He gets in my face and calls me a coward because I won't gamble with him. I tell him if I had any money on me I would shut him up right now. He laughs and just continues his parade of assholishness. He keeps harping on the gambling thing. Right around this time hopefully someone will come to my rescue and stake me. Usually a guy will come up to me and say hey I'll give you 20 bucks to gamble with the guy and shut him up so I will take that 20 and say alright how about we gamble for 20 and Frank will just laugh and say something like he doesn't even pick up a stick for less than a 100 and I go back to the guy and give him his money and tell him what Frank says. Hopefully I have done my part and these guys are sucked in because then they start to go around the bar and raise some money for me to shut him up. Usually its around 200 or so depending on the area. I have had a few times where it got up over 1k. After they raise the money I tell Frank to lets gamble and I proceed to lose it all to him in an amazing acting performance that should get me some award but I have perfected the art of taking a beating at the pool table without it looking like it was my fault. Frank leaves I stick around and apologize and then after an hour or so I leave and meet up with Frank down the street or wherever.. When I was younger and on the road hustling we could do that maybe 6 times a month and have all my hotels and food paid for from those cons so we could drive to the next town looking for a pool hall to hustle more dummies.
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Apr 18, 2016 15:23
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Carnival of Shrews posted:Hey, Kleeneze is British born and bred! Founded in 1923, not like these American upstarts I love that it was founded by a guy called Harry Crook (who apparently learned about MLM in America, so, still a yank invention I'm afraid)
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Apr 18, 2016 15:49
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jase1 posted:This story is a rehash from an old thread I had about hustling dummies at the pool table. I learned everything I know about pool hustling from my uncle. We use to run cons in dive bars all over the place all the time when we were on the road hustling. This is my favorite con that we use to pull because it worked almost every time. Have you thought about re-opening / restarting your thread? You must have been up to stuff in the last year or two
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Apr 18, 2016 16:00
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Since I got married and own my own buisness I don't shoot pool much at all. I mostly play poker and sports book. I post in the don't bet on MMA thread I think I have posted all my bets on mma and I am up 30k with most of that in the last year or so. I bet a lot on football and did extremely well this year. I guess if there is interest though I could just start the whole thread over again and with people asking questions it will get this old brain juices flowing and help me remember some stories. It's so much safer betting with my bookie then going into a bar and potentially getting stabbed when I hustle someone and they can't handle losing. I'm old and will most likely have a kid soon so I gotta cut that poo poo out.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:37
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Avalanche posted:Way back in the day during the cold war, my father played the fake gold bar scam on Soviet soldiers. He and his friend had diplomatic immunity to travel between East-West Germany on special assignments to deliver documents or messages or whatever in person to Russian diplomats. "Fraternzing" with the enemy is a huge deal that can land someone jailtime, but there wasn't exactly a lot of US oversight in East Berlin to catch them, no one really gave a poo poo, and all his immediate superiors he teased the idea to thought it was loving hilarious, so they got away with this for a while. How much money could you realistically make off young mope soldiers and slightly older mope soldiers?
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Apr 18, 2016 23:22
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Professor Shark posted:How much money could you realistically make off young mope soldiers and slightly older mope soldiers? Rare medals and poo poo, I gather. Unethical but still pretty cool.
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Apr 18, 2016 23:39
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Avalanche posted:These poor soldiers would dish out fistfulls of rubles from their pockets... What could you possibly spend rubles on in East Berlin unless you had access to commissaries or equivalent on Soviet bases? Wouldn't GDR marks make more sense?
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Apr 19, 2016 10:40
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Kopijeger posted:What could you possibly spend rubles on in East Berlin unless you had access to commissaries or equivalent on Soviet bases? Wouldn't GDR marks make more sense? Quite possibly he was just guessing that part. All's fair in love and (cold) war I guess, but that guy's dad seems like he was kind of a dick.
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Apr 19, 2016 12:33
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Either a dick or a good bullshitter...
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Apr 19, 2016 15:22
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Lutha Mahtin posted:Either a dick or a good bullshitter... It's hard to decide if it's bullshit or if American officers are such dicks that they'd allow him to run a scam on Soviet soldiers for the laugh.
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Apr 19, 2016 15:38
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I'm p sure dudes were pulling crap like that on both sides (probably with hookers, too.)
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Apr 20, 2016 00:44
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I like to imagine they perhaps did it in response to his dad. "Americans have stolen medals off of our soldiers, we'll just have to steal their dicks. Send over the whores. The more syphilitic the better."
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Apr 20, 2016 02:03
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Kopijeger posted:What could you possibly spend rubles on in East Berlin unless you had access to commissaries or equivalent on Soviet bases? Wouldn't GDR marks make more sense? I'll have to ask him. They mainly did it for souvenirs, occasionally pawning poo poo, and then just using the cash from pawning for beer money. I don't know if there was some underground currency exchange setup to funnel money from one side of the wall to the other since quite a few families were split up with the east/west divide or if they were doing some poo poo through the black market. Or maybe just collecting the rubles as souvenirs. The objective according to him wasn't really to profit off of it but to just be colossal assholes (like someone mentioned) and experience the thrill of loving the "enemy" over. The US and the Soviet Union were technically in a pissing match at the time and there are a ton of stories out there about the CIA and KGB constantly trying to one up each other with clever espionage tricks. Someone gets caught, politicians cool the situation down, and the cycle repeats. This was also in the mid-late 70s too and a lot of stuff in terms of regulations/conduct was a lot more lax back then it is now, the USSR was viewed as a very likely enemy we would go to war with in the near future, and there was a lot of bitterness towards the USSR especially with Vietnam. For example, if he was a junior office today and he tried to pull this poo poo, he would get loving court marshaled, dishonorably discharged, and possible jail time. I've also straight up asked him "You were not just delivering documents were you?" with his response being a big fat grin and him saying "Still can't talk about it." There's a lot about his early career I don't know much about but he isn't the type to tell wild, over the top bullshit tall tales. I'll see if I can get more details from him if anyone's interested. Avalanche fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 13:01
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The way I've heard it from a few people I've known who did careers in the US military during the Cold War, you could get away with a lot more poo poo back then compared to how things were in the nineties and later.
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Apr 20, 2016 16:33
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Very interesting thread! I don't have much to add other than that I gave my social security number to somebody on the phone who I'm pretty sure was a scammer because I was half-awake and not thinking clearly. That was a decade ago and as far as I can tell nothing happened, but maybe some day it'll turn out I took out a huge loan or something. Also, why is English so much worse now than back when we had sentences like "Swindlers have struck a new scheme for beating the unhappy granger who is inclined to make money more rapidly than by the paths of strict rectitude"?
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Apr 20, 2016 20:28
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Not much of a scam but if you're friendly and have a bit of charm you can get all kinds of stuff for free from minimum wage employees by just asking. Works best with companies that aren't huge corporations. Night shift, especially when they're alone or few, also boosts your chances. When target was closing I was looking at a TV and asked the guy if I could just have it and he said he didn't care one bit and basically encouraged me to just walk out with it. In the end the security guard were the only ones with guaranteed jobs in the near future so I passed. Also, if you can quick talk and get someone into a heated discussion they will frequently forget to scan items. Best I got was a couple free games on two occasions by arguing with the clerk at blockbuster that he'd be out of a job within six months. He vehemently argued that they would be fine. This was six months before all the blockbusters closed forever. Cocaine Bear fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Apr 22, 2016 |
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Apr 22, 2016 06:56
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JoelJoel posted:Not much of a scam but if you're friendly and have a bit of charm you can get all kinds of stuff for free from minimum wage employees by just asking. Works best with companies that aren't huge corporations. Night shift, especially when they're alone or few, also boosts your chances. STDH, big difference between a fre coffee and a TV. Also one of my best friends worked at Blockbuster during the spiral, they gave all sorts of poo poo out but not to someone who "[argued] with the clerk at blockbuster that he'd be out of a job within six months". More believable if you said you smoked out the bored guy at XYZ failing company and he hooked you up.
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Apr 22, 2016 07:20
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Lol, you got me! The ideal that minimum wage employees don't give a gently caress is pretty radical and out there. Here's another doozie for ya: if you treat people like humans they're often happy to repay your kindness. Crazy, right?
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Apr 22, 2016 07:30
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JoelJoel posted:Also, if you can quick talk and get someone into a heated discussion they will frequently forget to scan items. Best I got was a couple free games on two occasions by arguing with the clerk at blockbuster that he'd be out of a job within six months. He vehemently argued that they would be fine. This was six months before all the blockbusters closed forever. and everyone clapped
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Apr 22, 2016 07:33
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I just went into a big box store and asked is it cool if I just took a 65" OLED TV after we bonded over football, and the rear end in a top hat had the gall to say he valued his pay check, benefits, and not being in jail. What a loving scam.
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Apr 22, 2016 07:57
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EL BROMANCE posted:I just went into a big box store and asked is it cool if I just took a 65" OLED TV after we bonded over football, and the rear end in a top hat had the gall to say he valued his pay check, benefits, and not being in jail. What a loving scam. He said the Target was closing, I assumed he meant permanently. Not much left to care about then. I've gotten a couple of free things over the years because of the sort of thing he's alluding to, but it's been like, a 24 pack of water the cashier forgot to scan, or the cat scratching post that customer service just gave to me because it wouldn't scan and it was very busy. A TV is uh, pushing it a little.
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Apr 22, 2016 13:14
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Palisader posted:He said the Target was closing, I assumed he meant permanently. Not much left to care about then. His post is silly though, he only explicitly said he got free stuff by being an rear end in a top hat, never by being nice. And both his 'companies' were definitely big chains despite his advice. He just wants to sound cool in front of his internet friends.
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Apr 22, 2016 13:41
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Don't ya know? min-wage drones don't give a poo poo about things like future employment or keeping a clean record. You can totally get free stuff by asking them to help you steal stuff from their store.
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Apr 22, 2016 15:22
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Buncha goons butthurt cause they too ugly and autistic to every get free poo poo ITT. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 22, 2016 17:54
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What's the deal with gold buying agents?
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Apr 22, 2016 22:08
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peanut posted:What's the deal with gold buying agents? I think they give you way under value because you need the money. Then melt you grandmothers rings down and sell it for the current value
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Apr 23, 2016 01:27
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Speaking of which, those buy gold ads that were (are?) on Fox News were set up to get old people to buy coins with lower gold content and more "neumismatic" value. Anthony Wiener was apparently trying to push legislation to curtail the practice, which prompted Glenn Beck to make a website called Wiener Facts to mock and ridicule him. Then the dick pics leaked and Wiener dropped it, I guess. Wiener facts featured a dancing hotdog with Wiener's face on it. I might be wrong it's been a while since I read about it.
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Apr 23, 2016 03:51
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peanut posted:What's the deal with gold buying agents? They plan to melt down your gold and seriously under price the weight value. There's people out there have tested their gold content and weight before sending it in and had both underestimated in the valuations. That's not even to say the loss you'd incur for the price difference between the gold weight in your jewellery and the work that went into them. You'd probably get more selling the jewellery as is than melting it.
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Apr 23, 2016 04:34
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There was an A/T from a goon who worked for them. He was very open about how they were basically criminals, and sent out cheques for $0.01
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Apr 23, 2016 16:56
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cumshitter posted:Speaking of which, those buy gold ads that were (are?) on Fox News were set up to get old people to buy coins with lower gold content and more "neumismatic" value. Anthony Wiener was apparently trying to push legislation to curtail the practice, which prompted Glenn Beck to make a website called Wiener Facts to mock and ridicule him. Then the dick pics leaked and Wiener dropped it, I guess. Wiener facts featured a dancing hotdog with Wiener's face on it. The scam Goldline (which was the one Glenn Beck hawked the hell out of) ran was basically pulling a bait and switch on people. Goldline ads would try and convince people that they needed to buy gold, since gold prices would do nothing but increase and a total economic collapse was imminent. Once a customer was convinced to buy gold, Goldline would then try and get them to buy various gold coins instead of bullion (since the coins would be harder for Obama to seize), while never disclosing the fact that the coins were being sold at markups that approached 100% in some cases, so people who bought the coins lost a bunch of money if gold prices didn't keep increasing. Even people who bought gold bullion didn't do that well (depending on when they bought into gold) once the US economy started recovering, since gold peaked at around $1800/oz in 2011, but currently trades for somewhere around $1200/oz.
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Apr 23, 2016 19:01
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Professor Shark posted:There was an A/T from a goon who worked for them. He was very open about how they were basically criminals, and sent out cheques for $0.01 Yeah apparently some of them will respond with "that wasn't gold so we aren't sending you anything. No you can't have it back." A poo poo load of them will fly by night as well. You'll see a big, fancy banner saying "buying gold!!!" crop up down town and only last a few months. They'll promise things like "hey we'll keep your thing so you can buy it back in X months if you want" only to not tell you that the place won't even be there by then. Gold scammers are among the worst when it comes to outright lies and fraud.
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Apr 24, 2016 02:33
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Yeah i'd feel alot safer buying speakers from a guy by a dumpster then just sending gold off to some random address.
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Apr 24, 2016 04:03
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azflyboy posted:The scam Goldline (which was the one Glenn Beck hawked the hell out of) ran was basically pulling a bait and switch on people. So let me get this straight; the people who have the gold are going to sell it to me knowing that when the economy collapses I'll have gold that's valuable and they'll have all of my worthless cash. Nope, no scam alerts going off there.
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Apr 24, 2016 19:59
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Cat Army
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So lately I get one or two of these per week from different addresses (and they go right into my Spam folder):quote:Position available / (288505698217) I'm wondering if it's just the same old "Work from Home" scam, or else when you reply they to ask for your SSN and/or bank account number so they can deposit your "paycheck."
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Apr 24, 2016 20:04
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MightyJoe36 posted:So lately I get one or two of these per week from different addresses (and they go right into my Spam folder): Reshipping scams in particular are used to launder stolen credit cards into merchandise at Crazy Vlad's Discount Electronics. The scammer buys a bunch of merchandise online with stolen CC numbers and has it sent to the victim's house, then has the victim send it along to some other drop point (likely out of the country). Russian and eastern European organized crime are especially fond of this one, probably because they're so deep in CC fraud to begin with. Assuming the victim doesn't get a visit from the FBI during their "employment", they run up a month or two of shipping expenses, then get paid with a counterfeit cashier's check. That may come with the old "sorry, we made a mistake and sent you too much money, could you please wire us the difference via Western Union?" add-on, too.
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Apr 24, 2016 20:35
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