I'm still waiting for my butter robot.
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Nothing as bad as your story, but many years ago I bought something reasonably expensive on ebay and the seller convinced me to send the money by Western Union. Oops. Never saw the product of course, and later I found out this is a well-known scam.
Lesson learned.
I wanted a camcorder when I was 14 so my mom thought getting me a $50 Chinese one from Amazon for Christmas would be a good deal
Heh. When I was a kid, I wanted proper development tools. Turbo Pascal. A relative said they knew where to get a "good deal." ...imagine my surprise when there were no manuals and suspiciously hand-marked floppies. Didn't have the heart to tell them "you paid money for this?"
(I did later save up money to buy Turbo Pascal 7.0 for DOS. Still proudly displayed on my shelf.)
Capitalism and the "American Dream". The idea that if you just work hard and keep your head down, all your wildest dreams will come true.
From 1945 until around 1975 it was a real thing. Then the combination of Vietnam War spending, the Oil Crisis, and the economic policies of Ronald reagan destroyed it forever.
It's not technically a scam, but I did let Hilton once convince me to book one of their Vegas hotels at a discount, since I was traveling there anyway. I had to give them 45 minutes of my vacation time to sit through a sales pitch in exchange for the discount, and it was worth it, though in hindsight I wish I hadn't done it as I ran into some visibly poor people in the waiting room and it felt scummy as hell to be there.
Does religion count?
Got dayum and on an Sunday. You are brutal.
“Wait is this a…what day is this?”
Yes.
An old boss gave $100 of the store's money to a conman claiming to be the star player of the West Indies cricket team, who promised a sizable donation when he was able to get back to his hotel room. She got interviewed by the local paper about how she got swindled. Not a lot of money, but not a good look.
$1.4 million dollars. Your husband lost on a single transaction what most people will be lucky to save in an entire lifetime of work.
what most people will be lucky to earn in an entire lifetime of work.
Nah most people will earn that much in a lifetime. 1.3 million dollars divided by 40 years is $32,500 per year. The median and average income in the US are both way above 32,500
https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-percentiles/
The lifetime earnings for Americans is over a million dollars
https://www.theknowlesgroup.org/blog/average-american-lifetime-earnings/
Americans have very high incomes. That’s why they import so much.
Not for long.
The global average income is $7,000 US per annum. Americans are never getting near that.
Yeah, that's a more realistic way to put it. Even people who most would consider stable and well off, not rich, those would be lucky to save that much for retirement.
And to think that the entire scam made an estimated 250 billion won in total from all the parties affected...
Trump.
Not really a scam, he was pretty up front about it.
"We're gonna have a great economy"
"Project 2025 is not mine, I didn't read it"
"I will end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours"
Trump has never been up front about anything other than molesting women.
It is going to be a great economy for Trump and Musk and their friends.
Project 2025 was not his, and do you think he read it?
Me? Probably the leaflet delivered to my workplace that said "Missing a package? Call this (premium rate) number."
In retrospect I have no idea what I was thinking by calling it. Gonna blame stress, morning brain and the fact I'd been waiting an unusually long time for an international delivery, but I should have seen the big red flag.
Once I went through proper channels, it turned out the seller hadn't even got around to shipping it. "Stuck in their system" or something like that. Thankfully that in itself wasn't a scam (seller was a well-known web store) and my item turned up a week or two later at no extra cost.
Calling the number wasn't a million pound mistake on my part, but over a handful of similarly gullible individuals, the scammers probably made a few thousand profit over the price of a few leaflets.
Someone else? Probably a slick mobile phone salesman signing an elderly relative up to a contract rather than sticking with pay-as-you-go. The mobile phone companies really don't like PAYG customers because they're not a guaranteed constant drip-feed of money.
Said relative is usually pretty sharp when it comes to scams, and frankly it's not that expensive a contract, but still, I'm annoyed about it.
I'm drawing a blank and I definitely don't recall anything along the lines of what you're talking about.
I used to know a guy who was going bald and could not accept it. He was using two different drugs, Propecia and Rogaine, but decided to buy some of those "hair loss supplements" he saw on Facebook because they had a money back guarantee. He stopped taking the drugs while on the supplements, and within a few months his hair started falling out even worse than before. And no surprise to anybody but him, he wasn't able to get his money back. Those supplements cost several hundred dollars (USD).
And since some of the other comments are going for systemic things (i.e. government, religion, etc), I'll add higher education in the USA. It's FAR too expensive and pushed way too much, even for kids that have no business going to college. Young people can quickly and easily end up in six figure (or near to it) debt that takes decades to pay off, with little or no benefit.
community colleges are great and easy less expensive
That is true, but I feel like we could do better.
Community colleges should be as close to free as is reasonable, and normal universities should be federally limited to charging no more than, say one year of the maximum average income for a particular degree.
If the college wants to teach something like everyone's perennial mocking favorite underwater basket weaving, then that should be done as an elective and paid out of pocket by the student.
Even if you were to pick something like being a doctor, the fact that you might make a quarter of a million dollars a year and end up having to pay a quarter of a million dollars to do it is infinitely better than working minimum wage for the rest of your life.
The problem with this approach to education is that they'll just wind up cutting important but not lucrative majors like arts, English, etc. Your approach is more tailored toward job training programs than general education (which a lot of schooling has turned into). Costs definitely need to come down though.
I know no one is going to take my idea and run with it so there's not really anything to be gained by shooting it down, lol.
That being said, your issue could be solved with a combination of regulation and divestment.
Regulate that certain subjects have to be taught even if they are loss leaders for the university otherwise the university loses accreditation, and then for the people who want to learn artistic things like pottery and music that might cost the university more to run than they can make on it, create new schools that focus on that rather than keeping them in the university system, but attach valid degrees to them by requiring the mandatory core classes to be taken at the local community college or university of the students choosing.
Maybe you can subsidize them somewhat by making them non-for-profit systems and doing fundraisers for the arts and requiring that universities in their communities include them in their annual donor drives as a separate option.
It's not a perfect solution, but its the first of many possible ones that I can think of, I'm sure that if we were appointed as the committee to fix the American College system we would make many more and better all-encompassing solutions and solve the problem in a matter of years.
Even in Africa there are countries that invest in their citizens by providing free university education. How is America planning to stay relevant when so many citizens remain poor and uneducated?
is America planning
Apparently the only thing that's being planned is destroying the country.
So it would seem so.
Now that imports and exports are threatened, we might not se that many American products in the future. Well, Doritos and Coke are still on the shelf of my local supermarket, but I wonder how long will it be that way. Maybe one day the only American thing I can see are some old pirated movies.
I've seen reports of this kind of scam before, and it's fairly hard to defend against.
Unlike many scams, the scammers actually deliver what they are selling - the land. Of course they failed to mention it's useless if you plan to develop anything, but that's a lot harder to prove in court than a plain theft.
Do the buyers not visit the site first?
Do they not do even a little bit of research about the area before buying the land?
Do they not think about why the seller is selling the land at the moment right before when he thinks it's about to become much more valuable?
It's unfathomable to me how someone could spend that kinda money without talking to an expert or a government surveyor or something!
I spent a month considering if I should get a $500 GPU and I still fucked that up as it isn't even working on my Linux server yet.
I know someone who put the max amount down on the elio. He has the tshirt hanging as a reminder to never give anyone money without product.
I put a $50 pre-order down on the new slate electric vehicle.
Hopefully it pans out, and in like two years I'll be able to buy one, but if not, I mean it was only 50 bucks and it's investing towards a more electric theoretical future, so it's like I won't cry too much about it if I lose it, but I hope I don't.
shit my copium supply is running low
I've lost $50 more than once not knowing I lost $50.
So, you're light years ahead.
I've lost $400 on a bad drug deal. Don't sweat it.
Elio?
I hate to link to a subreddit, but use a mirror and you can avoid the ick. https://www.reddit.com/r/eliomotors
They have a few folks there who keep the 'story' alive and poke fun at themselves for once believing.
An electric car company that took deposits and didn't deliver cars.
Never heard of it. But as the author puts (money without a product) it sound like an MLM scam.