Have you ever been scammed?

[Kate]

Just out of interest where is this box of wine now?

Last seen at 10:50pm outside the Scottish Stores pub. Presumably they'd been trying to flog it to the barman as well.

 

[AGinAg (37)]

I was scammed opening up Moopy this morning thinking there might have been some interesting content to respond to.

 

[Inner Smile]

Here he goes!

 

[AGinAg (37)]

Here he goes!

You bet!

 

[Inner Smile]

 

[big ron]

My friend and I were approached tonight by someone trying to flog a box of wine they’d just nicked. Honestly I might have gone for it if he hadn’t laughed them away.

Couple of weeks ago I was watching a guy in a Greggs fill his pockets with food, he then came outside and ask a couple of mid 50's women if they wanted to buy an engagement ring. He'd given to his fiancee before finding out she was cheating on him.

I had to admire that level of not giving a flying fuck.

 

[AGinAg (37)]

I was actually scammed in Italy, but it was €15 and honestly I wouldn't want to have gone to Rome and not be scammed.

 

[big ron]

Strange but also very Tetris-coded one for me. I got scammed on Instagram having entered one of many competitions that tattoo artists run on there to win a tattoo. I got a message on IG from an account that looked like the artist’s telling me that I had won, and asking me to put a deposit down within the next hour or something to claim the win. I feel like in normal circumstances i’d have thought this was sus, but i’d just finished arrived at th accommodation I was staying at for a friend’s wedding following a long day travelling up so was a bit distracted and tired. Basically I put in my card details and then then next page was a subscription for some “video streaming site” that I was now signed up to for £60 a month or something stupid. Luckily it clicked then that i’d been had and phoned my bank.

The whole tattoo competition scam is seemingly quite common - the account that messaged me was one that was set up to duplicate the artist’s - same profile pic, almost identical handle, the same most recent ten pictures… I messaged the real account who was running the actual competition when it happened to tell them and the artist’s reply was actually a bit exasperated and was like “I know… this happens all the time, stop bothering me.” And sure enough, anytime I see tattoo artists running competitions now there is always a bit in the post saying “Winners will be announced on this page only, ignore any DMs saying you’ve won, report the account if you’re contacted (and don’t message me!)”

Yeah its happened to our account doing giveaways and also my mate who is a tattoo artist. They clone the page with a username that looks very similar, slightly misspelt. I think they crawl certain hashtags with bots to find pages to target, when we stopped using #instagiveaway etc it stopped happening.