Hello. This is me you’re son, send money Im in help of need. Many of us have likely seen something along these lines pop up on our phones—whether we have a son to begin with or not. But, phone scamming is only one of the numerous ways some people might try to take your money away.
Members of the ‘Ask Reddit’ community have recently discussed all the different shapes scamming tactics can take. They started the discussion after one user asked them which prevalent ‘modern scams’ made them realize that there were entire industries that are ripoffs, and quite a few netizens gave their two cents. If you’re wondering which industries they consider scams, scroll down to find their answers on the list below, and if you feel like sharing your story about someone trying to separate you from your hard-earned money, feel free to do it in the comment section.
#1
Finding out who sponsored “influencers.” The largest sponsors of “clean Tok” are cleaning manufacturers. Those makeup videos? Sponsored by makeup companies. All the “tradwife” and farm life videos? Sponsored by far right media groups. It’s ALL a scam. All of them are being paid behind the scenes to push certain goods or a certain lifestyle. TikTok is literally just watching short commercials with less transparency.
#2
The big scam: religion
A tax-free industry gets people to believe that happiness, health and economic prosperity truly depends on the frequency of attendance and the extent of donations ,
The Catholic Church used fear and indulgences to extrude wealth from hapless participants.
Modern religion uses HOPE as the way to bleed congregations and keep any abbherant thinking in check.
Gotta accrue those golden nails for your heavenly ✨️ mansion.
#3
Worked a month as a pharmacy clerk, health insurance price disparity is insane, especially on things like insulin.
SocraticIgnoramus:
This is also why you can’t ever get a straight answer in medicine regarding how much a given procedure costs. Everyone’s got these contracts with wildly different prices, but they know that can’t say “$5,280 with Cigna, or $37 with Medicaid” so they give all kinds of non answers.
The American healthcare system’s lack of a transparent fee schedule should literally be against the law.
#4
Software as a Service models. No one needs or wants their software to update and change formats every few months. We all just want a stable software that we can learn to use for a few years before a major performance upgrade. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t still be using Microsoft Word Millennium edition.
#5
TICKETMASTER IS TICKETBASTARD.
#6
Furniture. My wife is a huge fan of home design shows especially one called Dream Home Makeover. That’ll be important later.
So anyways, one day she picks out a rug for our dining area. It’s called The Janettte (yes, they name rugs) and we order it. It’s something like $1500. When the rug arrives it has a label on the back that says The Samuel. I’m thinking we ordered the wrong thing so I Google the brand and “The Samuel”. I find it on Wayfair for $300. This can’t possibly be the same rug can it? I take a chance and order it from Wayfair and when I have both in my possession I do a side by side. The EXACT same rug. Basically, these designer brands are buying stuff directly from vendors, changing the name, and charging 5x the price.
Fast forward a few months. She finds a dining table on Studio McGees website (the folks who have the Dream Makeover show). I do a Google reverse search on the picture of the table and find it on a random furniture store’s website for 1/3 of the cost.
Now I know these “designers” are nothing but glorified resellers.
#7
The funeral industry.
You dont need a $5000 box to put a dead person in.
The whole stuff they do with dead people is weird and creepy and intended to suck as much money out of the family as possible.
#8
I worked one day for some environmental fund raising b******t. We basically went door to door and begged for donations. We got 25% of all donations given, so if someone donated 100 bucks, 25 went straight to our pocket. They told us that people would ask how much went to the actual cause, we were instructed to say 91 or 92%. Some quick math there tells me they are telling us to lie.
They also targeted “white, liberal suburbia” because they said they were the most gullible, and from what I can tell their charity name changed often.
Don’t donate to unreputable charities.
#9
The “service fees” scam.
You see a price, think you’re getting a deal, and then—BAM!—at checkout, a bunch of mysterious fees appear out of nowhere. Concert tickets? “Processing fee.” Ordering food? “Convenience fee.” Even some hotels now have “resort fees” for things like using the pool (which you didn’t even touch). It’s like companies sat down and said, “How can we charge people more without actually raising prices?” And we all just… accept it.
Pure daylight robbery.
#10
Weddings. Everything about a wedding is incredibly overpriced and so far booked out for no real reason.
#11
Once upon a time, I attended a time-share presentation because they offered money to go. Yes, they are all high-pressure sales and scammy by nature, but on this one I spotted exactly how they were going to hose everyone involved.
I read the contract carefully (since I was there anyway and it made their salesperson shut up while I read), and quietly buried near the bottom was a mandatory cleaning and maintenance fee about half the rent of a modest apartment at the time that could be adjusted by them, at any time, with no stated limits.
Fortunately, they’d supplied a shuttle to pick up people and take them to the timeshare presentation location. There were about 15 of us in one of those little shuttle vans with seats that face each other. We started chatting on the way back, and I pointed the clause out to everyone in the group.
#12
When I saw my first crypto rug pull. That’s when I realized that most of the industry is a giant casino and it’s all about who can time when to get out of the coin the best. Very few coins offer any real utility and no one’s using most of them for anything legitimate. Most of it is just to move money across borders without the banks and governments seeing it.
#13
Most glasses, esp ones you can get at an eye doctor.. one can get frames & lenses online for like $30. There’s a big monopoly company that jacks up the prices in most brick and mortar stores.
#14
Companies posting that they are hiring but in reality the jobs were only posted as a way to show company is growing. I believe it’s a way to manipulate their stocks. Fake job listings make it so much harder to find actual real jobs.
#15
I had pet insurance for my dog for about 7 years. Every single thing that went wrong with him wasn’t covered. Teeth, heart problems…nothing. Ended up putting the money into savings instead.
#16
Women’s magazines. You literally invent the problem (“we see your saggy arms, honey!”) and sell the “solution” in the ad on the next page.
#17
Aromatherapy. Marketing perfumed chemicals being pumped into your home as healthy and therapeutic.
Sector of the chemical industry that has no obligations to test products for long-term exposure/harm. Have funded fake “research” saying breathing chemicals is beneficial – better than breathing clean air. Then created multilevel marketing schemes to induce stay-at-home housewives to sell to each other.
Straight out of Idiocracy.
#18
I’ve seen it pop up a couple times this week, but BlossomUp is a scam. If you pay to take any IQ test, especially online, the last thing you should be worrying about is how high your IQ might be.
#19
Bottled water. I am old and remember when people were like, what?? Like water from the sink? In a throwaway bottle? My mom would buy the giant jugs w/ the spout from the grocery store and keep them in the fridge. That seemed less whacky. But she herself was a little whacked out, and was convinced that the water was poisoning us. I live in the midwest, so she was probably actually right. But now companies siphon off municipal tap water and sell it back to us in plastic bottles that end up littering the whole damn world.
#20
Designer clothes, or designer anything really.
Many people spend so much money on name brands and all that stuff. I literally stopped buying special clothes since recently.
If I want special clothes, I have them custom made from a tailor and its WAAAAY cheaper.
#21
Don’t know if this counts, but I found an empty lot with barely visible no parking signs next to an ATM. Tow trucks would wait just behind the building for someone to park there. The person would park and walk around the corner to use the ATM. Then return to their car and it was already hooked up and the tow truck driver would unhook it for a fee… conveniently able to be obtained from the ATM.
You’ll never guess how I learned of this scam. It’s been years but I’m still enraged when I think of it.
#22
Like a decade ago Reddit was big on safety razors, the old fashioned twisty open thing you out a single blade into like what your grandpa might have used. Eventually I tried it out because of this.
I now spend less on shaving per year then I used to spend on a pack of razors for like a week or two.
Blah blah plastics lobbies and advertising convincing us to consume plastic etc.
I wish I knew more money saving things like this. The ROI is damn near instant.
#23
Factory Outlet Stores.
The products being sold in these stores are not the same products you get in their retail stores. Or that are sold through other retail stores. They are rarely excess inventory or discontinued product lines.
They are low quaility, cheaply made, editions of their products expressly made for their factory outlet store.
I wonder if they contract with those Chinese companies who get busted for making counterfeit goods?
#24
Resort Fees.
A below the line “tax” that inflates the cost of staying at hotel. It allows them to advertise one price, but get away with charging a higher price.
This is a pox upon the hotel industry. It should be illegal. It is false advertising. Any fee that is not optional should always be included in the price.
#25
MLMs even the more “legit” ones with a large corporate offices like Marykay and Avon are all scams. They’ve been around for a long while but they hit multiple consumer products industries and almost all of them are s**t products packaged to be nice. Most of it is junk from overseas including the makeup and solutions.
Their entire system is predatory against their own sales people where they have to buy in for the catalogs and the products, in hopes of converting their consumers into sellers as well. Back in 2009, I learned that Avon uses market research teams to analyze data on their sales teams/consumer groups to figure out which product line sells the best and how to craft the catalogs to upsell products that don’t move much but are high profit drivers. Most of this junk can’t be sold in stores otherwise the retailers will be blamed for selling it.
Vector Technologies, aka Cutco, has had sales people at Costco but not sure if they’re allowed in anymore since there’s a new CEO.
I’ve always known about MLMs, and can spot them easily as there’s usually some kind of buy in and it almost always comes from someone you knew like years ago. One particular highschool person I knew sent me samples of their product to try and I sent those samples to an organic chemist I knew from my pharma days. He confirmed that most of the s**t that was given to me is just toxic s**t that causes inflammation on the skin that seemingly looks like it’s eliminating wrinkles but all it’s doing is just irritating the skin. Long term use could cause necrosis and other fun complications but the entire industry of MLMs are unregulated by the FDA as they’re sold as minerals/vitamins.
That brings me to my next point that the entire vitamin market is scammy. Most minerals and vitamins we can get through food or we produce naturally in our body through various mechanisms such as vitamin D from sun exposure, vitamin c through eating acidic fruits and veggies, and vitamin b through various foods. The vast majority of the vitamins we consume through either multivitamins or individual vitamins, is not absorbed completely by the body and is usually pushed out. Now if you’re deficient in certain vitamins, yes those vitamins are helpful to your body but only if you’re actually deficient and even then you still only absorb a portion of the vitamins you consume. It’s also completely unregulated so that means claims on the bottle for how much you’re actually consuming can vary between manufacturers and products.
#26
The house-building industry. Bought a new house recently and they wanted me to use their preferred lender. Did some googling and the lender was a subsidiary of the home builder’s parent company and , as usual, sold the loan to another bank almost immediately. This is common and your initial lender will usually have a cheap-to-them loan, which they will sell to another bank for a slightly high rate, so on and so forth.
The builder must make a ton of money on selling the loan, because they offered me a 7% discount on the home price if I used their lending company.
Did some research on the history of the property the development was built in and they purchased it 15 years ago from another company for around $50 million. Did some research and, you guessed it, that company, which is no longer in existence, was an old subsidiary of the home builder’s parent company as well and they had purchased the 35 acres 25 years ago for only a few hundred thousand. Why did they sell it to themselves for a much higher rate 10 years later? My guess is that they wanted to inflate the value of the land.
During design, they asked if I wanted the upgraded ceiling fans for $1500 (3 fans total). I looked up the exact same model at home Depot and the fans were $200 each. By default, the home came with baseboards with a lot of curves in the cross section, which is no longer in style. The upgrade, which is just a straight piece of wood, was an extra couple of thousand. By default, the house came with the flip lights switches, which again are not really in style. The rocker switches are, and they were a $1k upgrade. They cost the same at a home improvement store! They were offering some things as costly upgrades even though they didn’t actually cost more to make, simply using outdated trends as the default in order to push the buyer to spend more money.
#27
My partner was working for a company that planted trees after Forrest fires. They also planted trees in non burn areas as well. They were generating carbon credits by planting these trees and selling them to large corporations who could then claim they were offsetting their carbon footprint. Well it turns out the tree’s were having trouble actually growing, and 10 years later replanted forests were mostly still devoid of flourishing trees. Yet still carbon credits are generated when the trees are planted, there is nothing requiring the trees to survive. The other thing was that land owners could sort of enlist their already Forested land as part of this which would also generate carbon credits. So a company could buy these credits, claim they are offsetting or carbon neutral, and pollute more without making any improvements.
The whole carbon credit industry is basically green crypto. It does nothing and the credits being sold are generated by failing projects that don’t do what they claim, while simultaneously allowing large corporations to pollute more.
#28
Nutritional Supplements.
Applied judiciously, they can be very effective at treating specific conditions in specific circumstances. Applied per marketing, though, they are dubious at best (and dangerous at worst).
#29
Nfts.
The whole idea is so stupid yet some few made a metric ton of money that some poor gullible people.
#30
I’m not sure why modern nursing care facilities/homes are not higher on the list. Some are good (but they’re 10k/month or more) but most others, s**t. Not to mention they drain older citizens’ savings until they have nothing left, then push them to Medicare and then bill the government at a higher cost due to the ‘extra’ work involved in using that system.
Total scam, that’s making some of the larger corp’s that own hundreds of these little out-of-the-way homes billions each year.
Just as many people are unaware of specific legal constraints, there’s also a vast array of scams preying on the uninformed.
This lack of awareness parallels the surprise many people feel when they learn about certain lesser-known laws that are still enforced today. While these laws can be a source of amusement or shock, scams often carry more severe consequences if not identified and avoided.