Scams

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What kind of scams have you been involved in?

How much $$$ did you lose?

How has the scan affected you psychologically and financially?

I get texts and calls every day trying to scam me out of money. USPS package arrived, UPS package arrived, Fedex, etc. You just have to click on this link to get your package. No thanks. Also, political bait: share your indignation against Trump, tell the Democrats what you think, support abortion, support this, support that.

If you get texts from unknown source - report as junk. Do not react.
If you get calls from unknown number, or number identified, but you did not initiate the call - block. Do not react.

I started getting a lot more of these scam calls after I shared my phone number with a lady I met in the park. I think she was a big noodlehead and her phone was hacked and all her contacts harvested.

I fell for that one but quickly realized my error and was able to freeze my credit card and get a replacement card before any purchases were made.

I enjoy keeping phone scammers on the line as long as possible.
Eventually they either twig, or call me stupid and hang up
I like when a fake microsoft agent wants to initiate a remote session and I pretend to read out a popup "backtrace complete.. please wait at your desk, your security officer will be there shortly"

I hate how everyone including AARP thinks that "people our age" (another annoying generic stereotyping) are nothing but ignorant senile scambait with one foot in the grave and the other foot in bankruptcy court.

Good thing.

I am extremely skeptical of any phone call, email or text these days. There is a TON of fraud going on. Really bad actors. AI and voice simulation will just make the problem worse. They can, today, call up sounding like someone you know. You would not know that you are talking to a computer.

I am told I will go to Hell when I dont give to my church where the reverend has multiple airplanes and a motorcycle.....What a joke.

College was the biggest scam I ever fell for. My family lost at least 20,000 to 50,000 dollars and cost me 7 years of my life. It destroyed my life. However it could of been worse because I never took out student loans.

So far so good. I had a near miss when I went to a popup sale run by some con men, and my wife at the time (who was always way too optimistic with financial risk) coerced me into buying a box that was supposed to contain some electronic thing that would have been a bargain but turned out to be something else entirely. Luckily when we made a noise about it one of the organisers gave us a full refund and practically begged us to stop raising the roof. Anyway that was only about £100, and we got it back.

I'm a hardened cynic and I don't hand money over to strangers if I can't afford to lose it. In fact I hardly ever hand money over to strangers at all. But some of these scams that pretend to be bona fide service providers can look pretty genuine. So I never click a link in an email if it's anything to do with money or banking details etc. I've stopped PayPal from being able to suck money out of my bank account, just in case I end up the victim of a hacking job. Online banking security is pretty tight - in fact it takes a lot of effort for me to access my own money these days - and it's amazing what the bank will reimburse.

Anyway I'm not feeling smug. More like paranoid.

I have not been scammed so far, but that is because my parents take care of the finance stuff.
I am kind of scared of what will happen after they die though, as i am very naive.

I have been getting lots of scam text messages saying I owe money for toll roads.

the lottery is a scam I briefly fell for back in the day.

I have been driving by a lot of casinos lately. Casinos are a huge scam

Same here.

I'm going more and more in the direction of only answering the cell phone if they are on my contact list.

Unfortunately, the office phone is on an old system that doesn't have such things. We have one number that has been hit so hard with scam calls that I had to unplug it from our system.

Whenever someone calls to sell something, I tell them that I will not agree to anything over the telephone. If they want me to even consider what they say, I wanted it sent to me by the postal system. That way, if it is a scam, I can turn it into the US Postal Inspectors. Of course, scammers don't want that and so they rarely, if ever, will send something by mail.

Interestingly enough, Nigerian scammers generally operated through the mail. With forged stamps. One of my brothers used to get them from time to time and he was convinced that they were legitimate. He figured that he was too busy to have time for them so he never did get scammed by them.

I also know someone who thinks that scams should be legal! As far as he is concerned, if you are stupid enough to be scammed, then you deserved it.

I keep on getting scam text messages saying I have a unpaid traffic ticket.

Some cell phones have the ability to permit incoming calls only from calls that are in the address book/contact list. I don't know if that applies to text messages, too.