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i'm not an expert or nothin but i would guess that fake phones are pretty common. they're a hot thing right now and that always attracts scams
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Jul 8, 2016 04:12
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drunk asian neighbor posted:The upshot of living in an attendant state is that they still have the locking clips on the actual fuel gun thing, so you don't have to keep the handle squeezed yourself the whole time. When I lived in MA, 90% of the time they'd remove the locking clip, so you couldn't even clean your windows or grab a snack from inside while the gas was pumping. This sounds bizarre to me. Is there a law about it? Driving in the upper midwest I've never encountered it. There was a law passed here a few years ago that requires people fueling their car to stay within close distance of the car, after gas stations complained that there was no official legal way to deal with dipshits who spill gas all over the place. As a former gas station employee I can say that this was super annoying. Also dangerous! The new law doesn't actually have a penalty though, it basically just allows gas station workers to shut the pumps off, and if the moron spilling gas complains they can now say "welp sorry that's the law".
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Jul 18, 2016 02:32
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It's pretty easy to spill gas if you aren't paying close attention. You can put the nozzle into the car wrong; even if you're just a little off this can do it. You can have a car where the door covering the gas cap is on a spring, and you wedge it open at first but then it snaps closed and sends the nozzle flying out onto the ground. Some part of your car can be screwed up so it doesn't trigger the auto-shutoff part of the pump/nozzle. You can even pull the nozzle out of the car with your grip around the trigger, and spray gas as it comes out because you squeezed down on it. Or you can "top off the tank" after the shutoff clicks, which doesn't actually top off the tank but instead starts filling up the line that runs from the tank up to the opening. Source: I worked in a gas station for a zillion hours in high school. We had a big barrel of this special material we used when people spilled fuel onto the ground. It looked kind of like pebbles for a fish tank, or some of those fancy salts that are opaque and kind of pink-colored. This was applied to the spill by using an old bottle of wiper fluid someone had cut the bottom off of (to make a scoop), so you would scoop up some of the stuff out of the barrel and go put it on the spill. It was really absorbent so usually just a few sprinkles would cover the liquid, and when it was nice out you could let the mixture sit there for a bit and then scrape it into a dustpan and dispose of it. This didn't matter during the biggest spill I had to deal with, though. I remember once in the winter when some lady I'd never seen before (small town, knew everybody) spilled just a ridiculous amount of gas outside. I don't know the volume, but it created an area about ten feet in diameter of varying gasoline-ness. This happened after that point during winter where the snow has become a permanent fixture on the ground around the pumps, and this mixes with all the dirt on tires and people's shoes, so her spill created this sort of liquid minefield of little puddles and glazes on top of and in ruts and hills within the snowmuck. So I'm carrying scoop after scoop of the solidifier out there, it's cold as poo poo, and when I'm done I can't even clean it up because it's all mixed in with the shitsnow. The kicker is that everyone else coming to get gas after her now steps on the snow-dirt-gaspebble stew, and tracks it into the store. Good thing I was a master mopper  That solidifier stuff also worked on puke, which is something I'm sure you were all wondering. Bright and early one summer morning I watched as a dad and his son were walking to the front door of the store, and the kid is clearly dry-heaving. So his dad says "well just puke it up", and the kid proceeds to yak out this delightful orange goo directly in front of the single door into the convenience store. They come inside, buy their snacks or whatever, and leave. At no point does the dad have the kid go into the bathroom to rinse out his mouth, nor does he inform me that there's a glob of liquid Apple Jacks and stomach acid directly in the way of everyone trying to enter the store. The gas chips worked on it though  e: wow this post turned into some pretty gbs poo poo
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Jul 18, 2016 03:29
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i had a call come in today from an unknown number, and based on the voicemail i think it was a legitimate wrong number! it felt really weird, because i realized i now expect pretty much every unknown caller to be a scam
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Jul 19, 2016 00:37
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JohnGalt posted:Cat litter. It was cat litter. The entire environmental consulting/cleanup industry is scummy with pricing things super expensive and ripping off their employees. We had a literal barrel of the stuff so thinking back, my guess was that it wasn't cat litter. Looking at some pictures of cat litter online though, I'm not sure any more. Either way it worked pretty well 
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Jul 19, 2016 03:02
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Herbalife Will Restructure Its Multi-level Marketing Operations and Pay $200 Million For Consumer Redress to Settle FTC Charges The day this report came out, their stock shot up like 10%
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Jul 20, 2016 17:40
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Dramatika posted:Had a fun MLM run in - went out to a bar, caught Uber home. Driver was cute, we exchanged numbers, Is this a thing, or is it only used by attractive women to lure drunk dudes to MLM pitches?
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Jul 27, 2016 12:37
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I meant the "scoring a date with your Uber driver" angle.
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Jul 27, 2016 14:43
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Tea.EarlGrey.Hot. posted:Why not just give them some fake info? Do they check ID? This reminds me of the time I "signed up" for a credit card consultation. I had just started college and some scummy credit card company was flyering our campus with ads for an event to "talk about your financial future" and "make sure you have the financial resources you need" and so on. The flyers all had disclaimers like "this is being run by Lowtax Capital Credit Card LLC" on them, so it was obvious what the deal was. And the deal was that they were holding this event at the good little pizza place down the block and giving a legit small/personal pizza to everyone who signed up. Being smug 18-year-olds, we thought it would be hilarious to scam the scammers. So we all came up with fake names and left our IDs in our dorm rooms. We get to the place, and oh my gosh the forms they had us fill out. They were full of questions about what we were planning to do with our lives, our majors, and lots of other information that was ostensibly for them to tailor their services to us, but which to me looked like puffery to get naive college students to feel big and important. Then came the damned Inquisition. This was where the cute/professional looking 20-something woman from the company took your form and asked you questions about all the personal information you put down. poo poo, she found us out! Just kidding, we all passed with flying colors. She did legitimately grill each person though, asking about specific things while looking directly at the person (eye contact) with an expression that she probably was trained to make in order to get kids to break down and admit they are lying. I'm curious if these scams are still going today, and whether a stern facial expression still is how they try and weed out fake information. When I started college cell phones weren't ubiquitous, so it would be kind of funny to see a kid's face when they check boxes for "yes this is my cell phone, only phone line" and then the staffer tries the number but the phone sitting on the table somehow isn't ringing.
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Jul 28, 2016 19:57
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my guess: spammers scraping real names from the web, or using name data from statistical resources like censuses. if you spam emails with names that are at least somewhat common, you will eventually by random chance send an email to someone who knows a person by that name, just like what happened to you.
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Aug 4, 2016 17:07
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alaska might be one of the states that require liquor stores to be separate from other stores. it isn't super uncommon, we have the same thing here and every Walmart, grocery store, etc. with a liquor store has it in a physically separated area with its own outside entrance
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Aug 24, 2016 17:29
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that's about as close as you can get to knowing it isn't a scam imo. didn't ask for cash, didn't ask for an easily-flippable item (like tide detergent), the item isn't even shelf-stable. yeah, she could have gone and sold it to somebody, but you aren't going to get much for 7 bucks worth of second-hand frozen pizza
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Aug 27, 2016 06:20
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ExcessBLarg! posted:I don't know if it was a scam or not. Probably not, it's a strange enough circumstance that it's a plausible story, although frankly I'm not sure how she got past the TSA boarding-pass check to begin hassling people in the X-ray line. Either way, if she had asked me I would've turned her down--I'm not taking responsibility for whatever crap is in that bag. I know that for international travel they actively warn you about not accepting luggage from others, but this was a relatively-small domestic terminal. do airlines not ask you several times about this exact circumstance when you check in anymore? i haven't flown in a few years but i remember even when i was a kid (90s) they would ask whether anyone had asked you to take anything on the plane for them
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Aug 28, 2016 21:02
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I'm not an expert but every Buddhist thing I've studied is against guilting people into giving of themselves. The concept I am familiar in Vipassana meditation is called dana, which my meditation teacher says is (paraphrasing here) the idea of generosity: the idea of giving freely and receiving freely too. There may not be an exact equivalent in all other schools of Buddhist thought, but the idea that you should not try and take advantage of others' generosity is very consistent with the Four Noble Truths, one of the core teachings of the Buddha.
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Aug 30, 2016 01:37
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cheerfullydrab posted:I have some knowledge of buddhism, but only the traditions of Tibet, and from what I can remember begging is cool, and good. It's a spiritual thing that monks and pilgrims do. The begging bowl is practically a sacred object. Hustling people for money and forcefully conning them into greater "donations" is definitely not okay. yeah there is a big distinction, at least to me, between a begging bowl and what that guy was doing. monks who stand outside a shopping area with their bowls aren't harassing people, they do it as an act of solidarity with the poor. flashing a $20 bill to try and guilt people is rather different. i mean who knows if he was even a monk 
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Aug 30, 2016 04:37
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Yesss, that's the article I couldn't find earlier. For all of you not in the know, prepare to have your minds blown.
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Sep 1, 2016 04:01
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you could joke about smuggling in maple syrup but that is probably even worse than weed now that i think about it
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Sep 1, 2016 23:13
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i knew that there had been a theft at the syrup reserve a few years ago, but 
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Sep 2, 2016 22:08
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:I know this isn't really the thread for it but can anyone remind me what the logic is behind that campaign "You don't own your legal name"? I saw some posters here in the UK and I remember a few months ago someone explaining it was sovereign citizen poo poo. Remind me pls? If nobody here knows, there are a couple other threads you can hit up. One is the Ammon Bundy/Malheur occupation thread, and another is the YOSPOS bitcoin thread.
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Sep 5, 2016 23:12
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:Thanks for those replies. So what is the economic incentive to pay for posters? I know most of the sovcit stuff is scam/paranoia/libertarian/magical thinking so what's the payoff for putting up enigmatic posters? this is kind of like asking why people put out election yard signs, or why a religious organization (besides scientology) would run a tv ad. it isn't for money, it's to raise awareness
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Sep 6, 2016 17:39
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B33rChiller posted:Why would they bother making the body of the email so well written, and so well formatted, but still allow it to appear to be coming from a UK email address? um everybody knows that canada ultimately derives its power from THE QUEEN so i'm pretty sure you're in the clear here. poo poo even americans like me know about that 
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Sep 12, 2016 05:59
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was there an invoice attached? don't leave us hanging!! 
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Sep 20, 2016 01:41
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i still have an old promo usb key i found in a college computer lab
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Sep 28, 2016 04:57
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MANime in the sheets posted:Theoretically, this could allow your TV to participate in DDoS attacks like the one that took down Krebs, yes? I mean, super unlikely, but it *could* happen. This is already happening. Your grandma is never going to update the firmware on the "smart" lightbulbs and digital picture frame that your little cousin set up for her. Many of these devices will never receive proper security patches from the manufacturer, or the company will go out of business. And bugs will be found, because bugs are always found. It is a disaster just waiting to happen, and I have not heard of any industry or regulatory initiatives to try and prevent it from happening.
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Sep 28, 2016 13:03
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monster on a stick posted:It seems you could just give a user a fresh VM with Windows/a web browser/whatever when they logged in assuming it's a lab or library or something. some of the local libraries around here do this. whenever you log out from your patron login, it reboots the machine
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Oct 3, 2016 01:21
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Professor Shark posted:How do those pages that pop up and tell you that "Windows has had an ERROR! and has been halted until you phone this number" work? I just got one and alt-cntrl-del'd out of it (scanning with Malwarebytes then AVG right now), but I know people who have been hit by them and have actually called. did u know, computer programs can have bugs sometimes
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Oct 6, 2016 21:19
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Yeah, a day or two after I wrote that post I also came across this article about the Linux kernel but forgot to post it here: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/09/linux-kernel-security-needs-fixing/
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Oct 10, 2016 04:59
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i think people were just gooning it up for a laugh. oh tee hee granny got big into drugs and sex parties hoo hoo
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Oct 14, 2016 07:13
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:Also, how am I supposed to check the ID? Write the name and number and check it by i-net later? The men themselves seem straight while collecting but are clearly ex-addicts (often they tell you this). The charities are all for recovery and rehabilitation of addicts - pretty worthy - but I don't want my money actually going towards drugs. I've seen this (in the US) a number of times. Every time I've seen it, it's looked like a scam. I once was drinking a beer at a restaurant's sidewalk patio, and a dude who approached me eventually pointed out that he was still wearing his work badge from his new job, then ask if I could buy him a beer. Pretty solid ask, right? Except that the badge was a real lovely hand-laminated thing, and he said it was for working at the Salvation Army, an organization which I think is almost totally run by volunteers. Another time I saw a guy hawking candy bars, standing on a corner right in the middle of a local college bar area, on Saturday night. Dude also had bad lamination skills, but his were for the piece of paper explaining the "charity" of a local park program for kids. Funny part about this one is that the guy was trying to hawk to all of us standing there waiting for the crosswalk, and in response a dude by me turns around and asks "really, this program is at so-and-so community center?". The scam guy answers yes, and then the dude says "That's weird, I just finished my term on the parks board this year and I've never heard of it" 
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Oct 27, 2016 05:08
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Pilsner posted:I don't understand why you are so hellbent on donating to people like this. It's simple: If you're the slightest bit in doubt, don't donate, save your money for something else. I am certain you can find 100 other causes that are more likely to be legit that crackheads on the street. I never donate to anything or anyone, because you never know when your money is going into a scam organization, being spent frivously on employee benefits within the org, or ending up in the hands of corrupt officials in a third world country. --an awful human
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Oct 27, 2016 13:56
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i got an email from my state tax department once. it was because i emailed them first though. also my question wasn't specific to any issue in my personal files, it was just a general "hey what would a person do in this situation" general thing
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Nov 1, 2016 06:13
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the polling firm YouGov is a legit "get points for doing surveys" outfit. but back when i did them, it was almost always really dull corporate research stuff they would ask about. like "here is a list of 20 brands, which of them have you heard of? which ones do you like?". it was pretty easy when they would ask me about things i don't buy, though. designer fashion labels? heh time to vote straight ticket on the idgaf column baby! *earns a nickel in funbux*
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Nov 5, 2016 01:54
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i think that was a failed "texbooks are scams" joke
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Dec 8, 2016 05:21
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The housing rental sections of my local Craigslist are lousy with scams and discrimination. I was looking to move earlier this year and it was a ridiculous slog to wade through all of the scammers and morons. And I think the nature of the housing section is such that the Craigslist flagging system doesn't work very well. What I mean is that other sections of the site are ones that people might watch on a regular basis, for example used musical instruments or video games or contracting work, so you would get a critical mass of people for the flagging system to take effect. But with housing people aren't going to sit and browse for fun, they're going to start looking when they need a new place, and stop when they find one. Combine this with the (IMO) dangerously low level of knowledge people have about rental rights, and you get the cesspool that is my local housing ads section :/
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Dec 22, 2016 00:41
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I included roommates/rooms-to-rent in my search so that made things like Craigslist and "walking around neighborhoods i liked to try and spot for-rent signs" a necessity. i eventually found a good place, it just took a lot of dead ends and dealing with idiots to find it
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Dec 22, 2016 02:02
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Over in the apts for rent, found a ridiculous scam. Ad looked like most others for this area, price seemed to match the pic of the house. Emailed the supposed owner of the rental home, who then sent a novel-length reply about how he was a pastor called to missionary work in Texas and had to move quickly, so he was renting it to a good Christian person. If we sent the deposit by FedEx/DHL, he'd overnight the keys. As if that didn't set off bells to anyone with two brain cells rubbing together, I looked on streetview out of curiosity and house in the address he stated in the email didn't even remotely match the picture in the ad. Was kinda tempted to string the guy along for p-p-powerbook fun but decided it wouldn't be worth it. I think we've discussed this scam before ITT, but this one has some elements I haven't seen before. I haven't ever seen one where the person claims to still live in America, nor have I seen one where they ask for the deposit via FedEx. The "good Christian renter" angle is unique too. All the scams I've seen like this involve bank transfers and people who supposedly live in a foreign country but own this house back home.
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Jan 28, 2017 18:09
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 i just noticed this was in the current rotation of goon ads. it looks like an e-commerce services company with an MLM bolted on to it
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Feb 28, 2017 20:55
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bulletsponge13 posted:Why is it always Nigeria? Why don't they change countries for better results? A lot of the scammers actually are from there. Nigeria is an emerging economy and IIRC one of the problems they face is having lots of educated people compared to the overall availability of economic opportunity. So if you have some skills with computers and writing, but you're stuck making a few dollars a day, maybe you start looking for alternative sources of income.
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Mar 30, 2017 16:03
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oh right, it's that article where she examines the downfall of Yahoo through the prism of a Schmorky cartoon
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Apr 3, 2017 22:56
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i remember laughing when the  stuff first came to light about snooping on the internal connections that search engines had between different data centers. yahoo released a statement back then saying they were unable to protect against it because the way their systems were designed, it wasn't possible to change their links between data centers to use encrypted connections. so like, all that a spy agency would have to do is find a backwater spot where the Yahoo fiber was buried and dig it up to splice in some equipment 
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Apr 4, 2017 01:36
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