"Romance" scams

Interesting thread. I don't know that scammers are necessarily better than they used to be as much as I think people are that lonely. As an introvert I like being alone, but I think most people don't. After they go home and look at their lonely lives many see that loneliness as a trap they long to escape.

The scammer casts out a net to see who he/she can bring in. Victims are frequently intelligent people that know they should be careful, but get caught up in the good feeling of not being alone, getting positive attention, and the heady escape of romance. Plus as a whole we tend to believe that bad things happen to other people - not us.

Scammers also have in common is the ability to read people. They learn how to say and do what will make us happy for a time. Those good feelings can be like a drug so a lot of people do things they wouldn't normally do to keep those good feelings coming. I think that's how they end up parting with their money.

Edit: I'd really love see what awesomejoe73 thinks as he's a retired police officer.

Was going to say that's one good thing about not having money... you won't get targetted like this.

But then I remembered about twelve years ago I was scammed out of three thousand dollars I took out on credit cards for a friend I had known pretty well for several years. He was handsome and charming and it was never romantic, but he got to me through my vulnerability that ended up having me join a spiritual circle that was really a pyramid scheme and my instincts said it was bogus, but my dreaming if it did work would be so helpful to me that I stayed with it long enough to realize I'd never get the money back, which went directly to him of course.

Then five years ago I got scammed, again not from a romantic conman, but a woman, a colleague, who ended up costing me just over three thousand in excess mileage and damage costs when the lease expired on a car in my name I let her use and make the payments. She needed reliable transportation so I would get my days off of work... long story and I ended up taking her to court (for the first time ever) and I won, but she never paid me because she wasn't working at the time, having been fired by then and involved in some criminal trouble. I wasn't the only one she stole from in this way.... she literally took several thousand from my employer and her family. My instincts wondered if she was on drugs, but my employer said no... turned out she was and had been using my car to transport them!

So it seems I am susceptible to it and have learned to say no to anything - ideas or people - posing as good when in fact they are bad... and to really listen to my instincts more than my wishful thinking!

Just the other year a friend fell for the "pc repair" scam... Out of the blue call from some Indian guy claiming to be working for a "3rd party company hired by Microsoft", that your  machine is infected with a virus/malware, and if you just let him on your machine (remote access) he can show you..

Of course you let them on and they run some meaningless stuff (which you can see) that shows errors in the log (mostly perfectly normal but they'll tell you otherwise), download a "scanner" script that'll reports lots of non-existent problems... But if you give them your credit card info they'll "fix" it all for you for "only" $250 (pick whatever they think they can soak you for).

My friend calls me *after* this of course. The first words out of my mouth were "tell me you didn't give them money", but of course it was too late. We're they having any issues with their machine prior? Nope, not really, "maybe seemed slower" but of course any good con will convince you of that. He tried to get the money back, but of course he willingly paid them for a "service" so that's difficult to prove fraud on.

I get those "IRS is going to arrest you for unpaid back taxes" every tax season the past few years... Even though the IRS has many warnings that they won't call you, they'll mail you (USPS). It's annoying getting 2-3 of those a day for 8 weeks - and of course I've just erased them all without response and the cops have never shown up to arrest me. ;)

Heck, people still fall for the Nigerian scam, and that's been around, known, in the news, etc, for decades.

Around here you also have to be careful of craigslist cons for real estate rentals. I almost was scammed about ten years ago where I responded to an ad for a lovely year round rental, but they wouldn't let me inside, which I knew was really suspicious. Then they wanted so much money sent to a foreign land as deposit, and still no internal viewing. At that point I reported them to the police and to craigslist for scamming (this was before craigslist had the warnings all over the rental pages like they do now).

Turns out they were trying to rent out somewhere that wasn't their's to rent.

One has to be really careful when it comes to online anything.