I recently fell victim to a nasty scam I've never heard about before. Wonder if anyone had similar experiences.<p>Happened in Serbia on a highway. We had an RV on German plates and slept on a gas station there, next to the truckers. Morning comes and the clutch pedal is dead - no resistance when I press it (this is a manual transmission car). Obviously not driveable, and we're not car gurus to debug it. We call the insurance but it's not responding (perhaps because it's Sunday). I find a tow car nearby and ask the guy for help, to which he suggests to tow the car 10km to his garage to investigate. I agree.<p>There they use the debug interface of the car to figure out that we need some part replaced (language is a bit of a barrier now) and quote us 700 EUR + VAT. I agree because we need to drive, and because I cannot contact insurance.<p>After the job is done I ask them for the old part (the replaced one), and they just say it's "software", after which I realize that I was just massively overcharged/defrauded.<p>Later when we discuss the situation with my girlfriend she tells me she's seen that tow car waiting seemingly for us for several hours, which suggests that the clutch damage was perhaps inflicted by the very people that fixed our car. I became scared of the whole situation and decided to not report it to the Serbian police and just leave the country asap (I mean if people cut cables in cars on the highway to get 700 EUR I have very low trust in the local law enforcement).
I remember the first time I got one of these "Nigerian scam" mails. In retrospect it is funny that what made me suspicious was not the offer to make millions in return for an upfront price of a few thousand bucks; it was the fact that the mail did not address me by name but started with the claim that I seemed to be trustworthy person. If I was trying to move a huge amount of money out of the country, would <i>I</i> ask some random stranger on the Internet for help? Exactly.<p>At dinner, I told my parents about it. My mother's husband, who is a (now retired) police officer who worked in white collar crime for more than a decade, started to laugh. "Do they <i>still</i> use that old trick?" And so I learned that this particular type of scam dates back at least to the 1980s, when scammers used fax to contact their potential victims.
You sit with an old friend in bar, already quite drunk. You haven't seen this guys for years but now that you had such a nice evening you really feel like old brothers. Now he tells you about this great house he has and that he considers to move to another town. He might let you take it before he puts it on the market and to a friendship price that he could certainly not achieve on the market.<p>Will you, at this point, remember that "Scammers dress up ‘opportunities’ with
professional looking brochures and websites to mask their fraudulent operations. They often begin with a phone call or email out of the blue from a scammer offering a ‘not-to-be-missed’, ‘high return’ or ‘guaranteed’ opportunity. The scammer usually operates from overseas, and will not have an Australian Financial Services licence"?<p>Probably not. But you might remember the story that guy on hacker news told you. You might remember, just as in that story, that you should look out carefully when a "great opportunity" arises. You might check your emotional state and find the comradry you feel to that old friend might not be based on facts since you haven't seen him for a long time. It's rather related to you two having a great night together.<p>And you might recognize that this combination of great offer, excitement, and a person who doesn't spend time with you often are combining to red flags for a scam.<p>But that is all because it was a specific example, a story. Not just a list of facts and attributes that generally relate to a set of scams that can be categorized as rather similar.<p>Therefore I'd argue that such a general list of scams, without specific examples, is not worth much. People's brain simply doesn't work like that. Rather check on Youtube for actual scams. Like "tourist scams in <countryX>".
FYI: I've put together an Awesome Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) Truths page. Subtitled The Art of the Steal - The Scammers' Big Lies at <a href="https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-ico-truths" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-ico-truths</a> . Buyer beware! Cheers. Prost.
These TV shows are very educational about this, especially the Real Hustle, which was a documentary demonstrating how to avoid scams in real life situations. I'm sure you can find them on some streaming service as repeats.<p>The Real Hustle <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0791615/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0791615/</a><p>Hustle <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379632/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379632/</a>
“Only pay via the website’s secure payment method—look for a web address starting with ‘https’ and a closed padlock symbol“<p>Someone should notify the Australian govt. that a padlock and https do not equate to security.
I didn't know there's a special "Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Australia licence" (and apparently there are separate versions for other countries as well).
As a teenager I fell for the most dumb in person scam. I was coming out of Barnes and Nobles with my gf and a guy approached me asking for money. I said no initially but then he made up this whole story about being out of gas on the way to see his kids and so on. You’d have to be an idiot to fall for that and idiot I was. So I ended up giving him $20, left feeling weird right away. I got in the car, looked at my gf and said “I bet that was a scam”. We went some place to eat then started driving home when not more than a few hundred yards away I see the dude buying booze at a nearby gas station. The only time I felt shittier in my life was when an elderly person sold me a car with a leaking gas tank, knowing that it had a leak.<p>I can confidently say I’m scam-proof today, learned the hard way to trust nobody, especially unwelcome advances. Ah, the things I did as a stupid kid!