Redditors Weigh In on Scams they Have Suffered

Reddit asked people to talk about the worst scams they’ve experienced.

“I was visiting at my grandma’s house when she got scammed. Got a call at about 9 PM from somebody claiming to be the police. “Yes, your grandson was in a car accident while driving drunk. He’s here at the police station, and this is his phone call, I’ll put him on.” Her “grandson” gets on the phone… “Grandma? Sorry my voice sounds funny, I broke my nose in the wreck… I’m in jail, can you pay my bail?”

Grandma was hysterical. She didn’t have the money to pay the “bail” they were asking for, and she was calling relatives left and right trying to pull some money together to get him out. In a last-ditch effort, she called her grandson’s cell phone, and he picked up, perfectly fine, wondering why she was calling so late.
Needless to say, we called the police, but they couldn’t trace the number. Disgusting how they took advantage of an old lady like that. I thought she would have a heart attack.
TL;DR: Don’t pay anyone’s bail unless you KNOW they’re in jail.

Another scam involves knives. “The American one is Vector Marketing. They advertise for students to start at $15/hr, so naturally a lot of kids are interested. It’s door to door knife sales, and the $15/hr is if your commission is at a certain level…they’re calculating that number by taking your commission and dividing it by the number of hours you’ve worked. There’s actually zero base pay. They claim that the “knives sell themselves!!” …okay. My roommate in college sat through a two hour seminar from these guys.

Vemma is in America now and it’s the biggest fucking scam I’ve ever seen. they are lying to college kids brainwashing them into thinking that they can actually make money by selling this energy drink (verve) to other people so those people can try to sell it. They pitch it as starting your own business and tell them that if they end up moving X amount of product we’ll “pay for you to finance a car” in which they give you $400 a month to use on w.e you want but they pretty much plant the idea in your head that you need to get a range rover Audi BMW etc. and have Vemma stickers covering it.

But when someone you’re flipping vemma products to “business” goes under because someone they were selling to can’t afford it anymore (or any situation in which your “network” isn’t meeting the quota to be eligible for the MONTHLY stipend) they stop giving you that $400 a month that they’ve convinced you to use on a high end car and you’re still responsible for the payments… With no income…

I could go on for days but basically this is a huge problem on college campuses and it doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

Ugh, fuc&^ng verve. Some of my friends got into it and were always trying to get me to sign up.

The whole idea is not really to sell the energy drinks themselves, but to get other people into the pyramid scheme. As I recall, you have to pay an upfront fee of like $200. You get monthly supplies of energy drinks that, if you want, you can sell (but no one i know does, they just drink it). However, the way you really make money is by recruiting people and building up a pyramid beneath you. The amount of people it requires you to recruit to cover the costs just isn’t worth the effort.

I remember i was playing a game of pickup basketball at the gym one night and we were doing really well. I was just playing with random guys, and after a few games we finally lost. While i was walking out of the gym, one of my teammates came up to me, introduced himself to me and we struck up a conversation. He was pretty friendly, but then the conversation took a weird turn. He tried to sell me on the whole Vemma shit but i recognized the pitch as soon as he started and just told him no and walked away. It was really awkward and really sad, because here i was thinking I met someone i could play pick-up games with, but no, just some guy trying to sell me some shit.

I’m sure if you tried hard enough, you could make money off of it, but in the end is it really worth it? It turns you into a fu$%ng salesperson. I can’t imagine how douchey it must feel to try to get your own friends in on a pyramid scheme.”