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I let somebody waste some time trying to scam me a couple of weeks ago here in Philly. This guy comes up to me and asks me where some church is and says it's near some intersection. I kinda size him up and the guy was a few years short of elderly and sounds like he is from out of town so I say lemme look for you and get my phone out and search for him but pull nothing up. I tell him sorry and start to walk away and he says "I have to get to the airport are you honest?" And now I know something is up but I also wanna know exactly what is up so I lie and say "Yea, I'm honest". He goes into a spiel about how his brother died recently and he wants to make a donation to that church but he has to get on an airplane soon so will I take this cash to the church for him? And he whips out what appears to be a big wad of money and starts to hand it to me saying "Please be honest and donate this" and now I know something is up but where is the scam... I tell him he shouldn't just trust me to take your money and he says "Now I know you are the one to take the money for me. Please, sit and pray with me" and he sits down at a bus bench and I'm thinking 'well I have a knife, it's insanely busy so he isn't going to pull a gun and I don't think he has one and I'm faster and I have a decoy bill fold...' and I'm just too curious to see what the angle is. So I sit. He says "I will put the money in something... do you have anything?" And I had a winter hat in my jacket so I give him that, and he takes the fat wad of cash, puts it in my hat and hands it to me... And then he says "You know since you are honest i know a prayer to bring you prosperity. You put some of your money in the hat next to mine so God knows you are honest too!" Now I am laughing and I say "Ahh there it is. Give me my hat back." And he tries to play it off like he's offended and tries to guilt me saying it is terrible not to trust a man of God and I say "Gimme my hat back!" So he takes the wad out and throws the hat at me and I tell him "Just so you know I'd have given you ten or twenty if you'd asked nicely" which is a lie but I was kinda let down his scam was so stupid at the end so I wanted it to sting. Also I forgot to mention he said he was from Africa and talking in a pretty bad fake accent but I didn't wanna upset him too much by calling that out too.
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May 4, 2022 23:24
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:That's an interesting variation on the pigeon drop. It was just such a terrible scam. There was no way that the guy was faster or stronger than me so unless he planned on pulling a gun in the middle of downtown surrounded by people I don't know what his getaway plan was beyond "Assume that this person will just let me walk away with their money and hat" if I had been dumb enough to put my money in my hat and give it to him. And also it is Philly so it's not a good idea to bet that the person you're attempting to take money from isn't down to fight you for that either, I have seen an old dude in a business suit slap around a crusty-rear end junkie for trying to take his phone. Just seems like he ran out scam-steam at the end, really.
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May 5, 2022 17:16
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Remulak posted:Nice. When I lived in the south side of Chicago (yes, Hyde park) I listened to the whole list of almost the same scam, complete with fake African accent, then like in a movie my Nigerian buddy walked by at exactly the right time and I roped him in to ‘translate’. Haha it's funny how these kinds of things become like "shady memes" or something, and get passed around between people and it make it's way all over the drat place. Stuff like that makes me wish I was good at sleight of hand stuff, I'd love to have dropped one of those fake Jesus $20s in there just to see the end of tha stupid scam play out and pretend to be upset for a bit. Oh yea, and the reason I have a couple of those fake Jesus Bucks is kind of funny too. I was riding the El line here in Philly going to Fishtown. For those that don't know, in that direction a few stops more is one of the worst open-air drug markets in the country so that part of the line is always populated by a ton of homeless addicts who panhandle on the train. A few days into December these two young guys got on the train and started handing out those fake JesusBucks to people on the train. They gave out a few and everybody who got one looked annoyed, when they got to me I took one and I stopped them and said "Yo, I know you think this is a nice thing to do but you need to stop right now. You're going to give one of these to somebody who actually wants and needs money and they're going to be extremely pissed. Do. Not. Give. These. Out." One of them kind of tried arguing and said something like "We're only giving out the word of god on something somebody will take a look at" or something and I was like "Dude go buy some packs of cookies or crackers and print some words or something but stop giving out fake money you really could get your asses kicked, I'm not kidding." The other guy nodded and I think understood more clearly and they ended up getting off at the next stop so I like to think they listened. But man what a stupid plan, getting people excited they're getting money only for it to be a piece of paper that you can't trade for drugs. I mean, I've actually had somebody get pissed at me to the point of yelling because I wouldn't give him a "short", which means the last bit of a cigarette, so I can only imagine what some of those maniacs would do if they got a fake 20. Tumble fucked around with this message at 15:35 on May 7, 2022 |
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May 7, 2022 15:27
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CoolCab posted:SEO, which has completely ruined most search engines. they want your clicks and point AIs at a list of keywords and poo poo out this garbage to trap your attention for as long as it takes to realize it's nonsense, which improves their SEO and lets them serve ads. I was thinking about this the other day, about how terrible search engines have become. I think it's a combination of SEO bots like we're talking about here, and also because the amount of actual web "surfing" (remember that radical term dudes? grab a slow-loading jpg of sunglasses and catch that 4-frame 32x32 gif of a cartoon wave because we are going to surf cyberspace!) that we do has gotten much, much lower. Pre-2005 -- before YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and the like -- the amount of different websites we'd visit was much, much higher. We'd entertain ourselves with all sorts of different content, stuff like SeanBaby, OldManMurray, peoples personal websites that weren't really blogs, tons of different forums... just tons of stuff. So Google had tons and tons of actual content for it's bots to crawl through and index, and it had lots of data because lots of people were searching google to find results from all sorts of websites. As time went on we started spending less and less time on random sites and more on sites like YouTube and Wikipedia so there was a lot less content from people-created websites for the google index-crawlers, and with less searches leading to random websites it also became a lot easier for SEO bots to get basically any result to the top. bamhand posted:Ah interesting. There's hardly any ads though. Or is that like a phase 2 after they start regularly hitting the top of the search results? Seems awfully elaborate. The website really does look quite nice and has a ton of articles, it only turns into gibberish when you try to read them. Looks like they ran a bunch of real car articles through auto translate or something? Are you running an adblocker?
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May 10, 2022 19:07
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DiabloStarCraft posted:It's gotten to the point honestly that if I want like a product recommendation or help with a game or something I'll search (thing I want) Reddit, even then sometimes you come across spam both on and off that platform What, you ain't gonna rely on the reviews on the product's own page!? I mean look at those 5 star reviews, there are like 46 people who liked that thing so much they signed up just so they could make it their first review. And oh wow some of them were so smitten with it that they didn't have to buy a single other thing. But yea I do the same. I remember I was looking for a decent flashlight and was hoping to find a thread or two and ended up finding an entire subreddit dedicated to them lol it's also good for tech support, one time my TV went all purple and weird and I thought it was dead. I searched the problem and a reddit comment popped up with that exact problem on the exact same model with the solution posted a few comments down. Tumble fucked around with this message at 19:59 on May 10, 2022 |
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May 10, 2022 19:56
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Volmarias posted:You joke, but we actually were. Tricking people into opening goatse used to be a viable thing to do to friends, because every link was a mystery waiting to be discovered. Your family interaction with your extremely racist uncle was limited to Thanksgiving. YouTube was just weird fun stuff instead of HEY DONG LOVERS YOUR BOY DONGLORD HERE WITH ANO-, etc. greazeball posted:The internet was a lot better when every activity wasn't centred around being served ads and/or having your data harvested to tweak your ad servings tomorrow Tricking people into clicking stuff died as a prank the day "never gonna give you up" became monetized and started playing ads before the song.
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May 11, 2022 15:42
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