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This absolute bastard said he would give a rune platebody to the person that traded him the highest value item as a sign of trust… lost a DDP++ to that jerk.
Which sounds like a joke, but that was a real eye-opening experience for 8 year old me. Enough that 20+ years later I still reflect on it on an almost daily basis, to remind myself that if something seems like a bleedingly obvious scam it invariably is.
When I was playing that game as a youngling, someone asked me to help get some wine from a cult temple. I did, which made the door slam shut and every cultist in the room attack me. I just barely made it out of there alive.
Then they told me to go get a second one. Yeah, they didn’t need wine, they wanted me to die to a trap so they could take my stuff without killing me.
I’m embarrassed to say I actually went to get that second wine.
I fell for the same thing back in the day. Probably where my trust issues began….
I don’t have trust issues, and I think that might actually be worse. Like, if that happened now, I’d only shirk at going in twice, but I’d still go in once.
Lol when I was 15 or so I got way into competitive pokemon, and that eventually led to me breeding my own mons. Early on in my journey, I met some dude on Serebii chat that wanted to to do a 2 for 1 trade for my kingdra. He just sent over the pidgey and didn’t send over the other mon. I was really salty about that.
by the time gen four ended, I had bred a flawless Kingdra and (still to this day even) have all my .pkm files backed up on a hard drive somewhere.
Where would one go to look into backing up Pokemon?
…and if they’re backed up, why not Gen them? Haha
I guess it’s the satisfaction of knowing they’re truly legit.
Lol so the program I used was called HyperGTS. You could change the DSs target server, and you changed into to your routers IP, and then you could send stuff up to the GTS, at which case it would be saved into your PC. You could send it back the same way. I also have my .sav files. I might have gotten into the switch games if there was an easier way to transfer my old pokemon over.
The practice of cloning was (and I have to imagine, still is) pretty standard among breeders. Most competitive pokemon was (and again, still is) tool assisted: We made use of tools to check IVs, and to clone. The mons themselves were not altered. That was the point; no one cared if you were battling with hacked mons, as long as they were legal. There were still events that checked legitimacy, and those created a demand for legit mons. That being said, once RNG became standard issue, I just bred because I was playing in the pre RNG days and I liked them.
Is “Gen” the new pokesav?
Thanks for that! That’s some good stuff for me to look into.
Gen is just the word I saw people using for “generated Pokemon”. It was probably Pokesav, but obviously I’ve never gotten too deep into the scene, haha
In the early 2000s, I bought a book for someone from amazon.com. I’d had good experiences with Amazon a few years earlier in the late 90s when it worked like a normal store - you pay Amazon and they send you the book you ordered. Little did I know that Amazon had since become a ‘marketplace’ where they let any old scammer list, take your money, and not send anything. After a couple of months with no book arriving, luckily I was able to charge back and get the money back from the bank.
In a trains station gave someone enough money for a ticket cuz he was claiming that he lost his train. Felt real stupid when I saw him the next day asking the same shit.
Consider that at the time you were helping a stranger with the relatively trivial cost of a train ticket.
Now you know you “helped” a likely homeless dude.
Technically a scam but a pretty minor one.
Probably not homeless, pretty well dressed, that was probably his day job.
An assumption on my part.
I’ll argue that not everyone begging for coins is scamming though some probably are. Trying to figure out which is just a recipie for misery.
Train tickets by me cost 4x an hour of minimum wage work. Even if a single person helped per hour, that’s more than enough to make it worthwhile compared to a paying job. That’s a scam, taking advantage of people’s help as a regular living rather than making an honest living.
Train tickets near me have a variable cost depending on how far you’re going, but the bus costs about 1/4 or 1/5 of minimum wage per hour…lol
That’s a much more costly train ticket than I was imagining.
I was assuming something like the inverse of that: a quarter of an hour of minimum wage.
That does tip the scale back to scammy.
Person you responded to was not the original poster. Not sure why they’ve felt the need to inject extra information that is entirely unrelated to the comment you replied to. Seems pretty scammy to me
I guess I just got scammed.
This happened to me in a Walmart parking lot with a guy telling me a sob story about how he’s traveling with his family and out of gas (with a gas can in his hand). I didn’t give him any money but saw him there in the parking lot a couple weeks later and he gave the same story obviously not recognizing me from before.
I fell for this one in college. At the time I felt really stupid, but it was less than $20 and that guy probably needed it more than I did.
Wanted to sell my ps4 cause I wanted something else, nearly fell for a scam on offerup.
I paid for Windows 10 once. It was actually quite good at the beginning but then, through updates, Microsoft turned into intrusive garbage of a system pushing their shitty services and behaving like my laptop was their property. I’m still ashamed of that purchase. If you really need anything from Microsoft - pirate it.
Oh yeah? I paid for WIndows Vista. I mean it eventually upgraded to 7, 8, and 10. But that was it…
I upgraded to Windows 11, and I regret it to this day.
I was forced to upgrade my work laptop by my company, and I basically lost two full days of productivity because of how truly shitty the new OS is. Still not back to normal productivity, and it’s been two weeks. Definitely felt like a scam…
I went to buy Norton Antivirus. (This was… probably almost 25 years ago?) I went to
https://symantic.com/. The correct domain name washttps://symantec.com. (“e” vs “i”).https://symantic.com/went to a page owned by… I think it was Avast. But the page was (in retrospect) very obviously meant to look like it was made by Symantec/Norton. It had images of cardboard boxes like software CDs used to come in and such, in exactly the Norton yellow/orange.I went through their purchase funnel and installed Avast before I realized it wasn’t Norton. As soon as I realized it, I immediately uninstalled it. I don’t remember if I found any way to contact Avast, but I did call the credit card company and contested the charge. Avast contested the… con…test…ment…? I appealed and Avast gave up.
And I bought Norton.
2 scams in 1 day, not bad.
My RuneScape account got rinsed because of my teenage stupidity in the early 2000’s, learned a very valuable lesson and haven’t been scammed since.
That’s why I’m glad lemmy censors your password if you write it in a comment, For instance: /*******
All I see is
hunter2
I got lured for my bandos armor back in the day, I stopped playing for a couple of years after that one
Capitalism
Bottom text
I learned about Pump and Dump the hard way. 🤷♂️
What is this? Breast milk when drinking alcohol??
It’s an old scam classically done with penny stocks and in modern times with crypto. Scammer buys up a whole bunch of garbage investments, cold calls a bunch of inexperienced investors and gets them to buy in (the pump), the price of the investment shoots up, and the scammer sells all their shares before the price collapses (the dump.)
It’s actually illegal, but people still get away with it.
Rough times when you’re forced to go at a sketchy gas station 😖
Someone contacted me on Steam and asked if I wanted to play TF2 with him. It was one of my most played games at the time and I had a TF2 avatar, so no surprises here.
That person later asked me to rate their TF2 team on some website. Didn’t care first but did it eventually. The website needed Steam auth but just faked the Steam auth and relayed every bit of information you entered to steal your account.
Quickly realized my mistake and reset my password before anything happened. Im still surprised how much effort went into this fake rating site just to steal some Steam accounts.
Something similar to this happened to me but I think it was for CSGO. The steam sign in page was a fake popup window inside the main website, draggable and all. I realized it was fake when I noticed it was light theme while my computer was dark theme.
Edit: I realized it was fake before I signed in, luckily
I have basically the same story, except it was one of my actual friends on Steam asking me to rate their CS:GO team. I fell for it since I was trying to be nice, and luckily changed my password before they could turn around and use my account for the same thing.
Had some Steam based scammer a couple months ago. I basically instantly suspected a scam and played along, trying them to waste time.
Sadly, they didn’t play along that much and ghosted me :(
Mind if I steal your idea and turn this into a psych/thriller/adult manga?
feel free! if anything comes from it, I’d be interested in seeing it
A buddy of mine got her Discord account hacked by someone doing this. They gave her another Discord user who was playing as an employee. To “prove” the account was hers she had to change the validated email to something they sent. She mentioned something about it and then I and another person in IT started freaking out.
All in all it was fine and she got her account back. I think she was just embarrassed. I think it’s the first time she’s ever had someone try to do something like that. Me and the other person who caught it were trying to reassure her that we noticed it because we’ve had to do so many IT trainings and phishing tests over the years.for work.
yeah, the second they said something about reporting me by accident and steam banning my IP I knew it was a scammer. Although I suspected it before, as I never had a random person message in in 20 years of using steam.
I had hoped to lure the scammer a little bit further and figure out what they wanted to do, but I got too excited and scared them. very sad
They were almost certainly going to tell you that if you didn’t act then both of you would get banned then direct you to a fake Steam employee or fake website. It’s interesting they randomly messaged you. Normally this relies on being done to friends.
I haven’t changed my Steam password since I got an account many, many, many years ago. No idea what it is anymore—something really short and basic—but other people do. I get two-factor hits all the time 🤣
I fell for these but they offered free csgo skins or knives instead. Steam support got my back with that.
Pig butchering romance scam on Tinder. Matched with a pretty girl. Our conversation felt genuine. Even had a short video call. But things were feeling a bit too good to be true, but I went on to see where things were going.
Saw through the scam once she started offering helping with cryptocurrency investment, so I didn’t lose anything.
What does that have to do with pork products?
It’s apparently a reference to fattening a pig before the slaughter. Basically, they trick you into feeding their crypto-pig before running off with all the pork.
As the other person said. The metaphor is that you trick the person into making small investments first into a fake cryptocurrency app, and then over time make bigger and bigger investments. Like feeding a pig.
When the victim has made a large investment (the pig is well fed), cut all connection and run away with all the money (the butchering).
It’s a scam that targets emotionally vulnerable people and can go on for many weeks.
When i was a kid i’ve fallen into thoses fakes instagram accounts of celebrities asking you to call a number to get an iphone
One of those near-number ones where you’re trying to call customer service and you get a scam instead. Something about a free cruise. Fortunately I came to my senses, the operator was very slick and kept redirecting me away from things that would make me think twice.
I got one of those once. Tried wasting their time but they weren’t having any of it. Wanted to get straight to the sale?? of this supposed cruise I won. Wanted my credit card number. They thought they had me in the bag, but I had a card up my sleeve. See, a lot of credit cards and credit card systems have these dummy card numbers you can enter to test the system. The POS will recognize the card number as valid and try to run the charge without flagging it as an invalid number. I slowly read a couple of these to them with it coming back denied each time. Kept trying over and over, LOL. “I don’t understand! I have lots of money in that account! Let’s try again, I’ll read it a bit slower this time.” Hahaha
World Games Inc. (A pyramid scheme originating in Australia, billed as selling stock in an online gambling site)
A few friends recommended that I joined. I probably would have if I wasn’t already broke.
