scams

Sometimes it's easy to pick out a scammer. Like that email half in Cyrillic claiming to be your lost uncle Rupert who wants to give you his fortune but first you need to send him your social security number and ten thousand dollars in iTunes gift cards? Probably not legit. But there are some deeper, darker scams that have been normalized by society. Institutions we've trusted for years might be happy to do business with us just because we're easy marks.

We are at heart, frugal, sometimes to the point of staggering paranoia. We're the kind of people who are inclined to look at an overpriced jar of pickles and say to ourselves "Big Pickle must be stopped." Just because a business, practice or concept has been operating for decades doesn't mean that it's not just a scam that people overlook. Stupid pickles are just vinegar and cucumbers anyway.

On the flipside, here are some things people think are scams but aren't really.

We can't believe this scamming tactic ever works. How many people believe that a complete stranger claiming to be a CEO or government official or whatever would need you to pay them with gift cards? Either way, when it happens to savvy people, they try to have fun with a text message scammer. The person on the other end is apparently so desperate for those gift cards that scammers can get trolled for a ridiculously long time.

You shouldn't be so suspicious of every human interaction that it ruins your life, but there are definitely a lot of scams out there. That said, when one correctly identifies a scammer, they can mess with them with awesome results, like this scammer that got trolled and taken on a wild ride or this scammer that got trolled with photoshop skills. Here's a story of an unlucky scammer who called an electronics store.

Someone on AskReddit asked for people that used to work for MLMs to share their experiences. Finally, a peek behind the curtain of what drives those sketchy and deceptive machines. Keep an eye out for these red flags so that you don't fall prey to their shady tactics.