Someone contacted me on Steam and asked if I wanted to play TF2 with him. It was one of my most played games at the time and I had a TF2 avatar, so no surprises here.
That person later asked me to rate their TF2 team on some website. Didn’t care first but did it eventually. The website needed Steam auth but just faked the Steam auth and relayed every bit of information you entered to steal your account.
Quickly realized my mistake and reset my password before anything happened. Im still surprised how much effort went into this fake rating site just to steal some Steam accounts.
Something similar to this happened to me but I think it was for CSGO. The steam sign in page was a fake popup window inside the main website, draggable and all. I realized it was fake when I noticed it was light theme while my computer was dark theme.
Edit: I realized it was fake before I signed in, luckily
Had some Steam based scammer a couple months ago. I basically instantly suspected a scam and played along, trying them to waste time.
Sadly, they didn’t play along that much and ghosted me :(
A buddy of mine got her Discord account hacked by someone doing this. They gave her another Discord user who was playing as an employee. To “prove” the account was hers she had to change the validated email to something they sent. She mentioned something about it and then I and another person in IT started freaking out.
All in all it was fine and she got her account back. I think she was just embarrassed. I think it’s the first time she’s ever had someone try to do something like that. Me and the other person who caught it were trying to reassure her that we noticed it because we’ve had to do so many IT trainings and phishing tests over the years.for work.
yeah, the second they said something about reporting me by accident and steam banning my IP I knew it was a scammer. Although I suspected it before, as I never had a random person message in in 20 years of using steam.
I had hoped to lure the scammer a little bit further and figure out what they wanted to do, but I got too excited and scared them. very sad
I once had one of those crypto-people message me with a sales pitch, asking for money to help start their small business in Africa or something like that (can’t remember what, I think it was a micro-brewery)
As an actual business owner, their initial ideas sounded okay, and I began forwarding them resources on how to secure a low-interest loan from their government and grants and stuff like that and then they abruptly closed up with:
“This is scam, brother. This is scam. You have good heart. I tell you only once, do not message this number.”
We forget that on the other end of scams are real people with real problems, morals, and lives. The person on the other end of your scam probably started to feel bad and helped you out. And likely that person is being forced into performing these scams on people.
There’s an excellent “Search Engine” podcast episode about this that came out recently called “Who’s behind these scammy text messages we’ve all been getting.” It’s well worth a listen because it dives into all the slavery and human trafficking involved in modern scams that people aren’t aware of.
That’s the website, but it’s not rendering for me for some reason.
Here’s a PocketCast link:
Look up “pig butchering” by John Oliver. Yes, this is the technical term for it.
Not the one you asked for, but another interesting episode on the topic: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/141/
When I was younger, like 15/16, I was working a job in a stone quarry during my spring break. Long days, hot sun but all cash and made decent money.
One of my neighbors whom I would briefly speak to all the time wanted to borrow some money. I think it was $400 or something. At that age, I wanted to help out and I wanted seem cool, so I lent it. He asked for a bit more and more and eventually it ended up to about $1100. My neighbor said their paycheck was coming ‘next week’ and could easily pay me back.
Next week never came. I followed up with the neighbor and they said something happened to their paycheck but the money was coming. He then said a showing of good faith, he’d give me his payslip as proof and that I needed to get it back to him so I he cash he check. Stupid me knew something to was up but because I was naiive and impressionable, I told him I trusted him and I’ll await the money.
I managed to get his number and I called to follow up again, but he had some girl answer the phone and when I asked to speak to him, she said, “Oh he’s getting cookies right now…”
A week later the phone was disconnected and then I didn’t see him for a while. I then moved out of the neighborhood.
Eventually I saw him a few years later and mentioned about the money that he owed me but he ‘wasn’t sure what I was talking about’. I long since before then realized the money was gone. Expensive lesson but that’s a story of how I got scammed.
That’s pretty expensive for the age, but cheap overall. I was in a similar situation with my coworker at the same age, but it was luckily about an order of magnitude smaller a loan. I mentioned it to my family and they sat me down to explain that I’d inadvertently given both of us a gift, just mine was in the form of experience.
I got lucky with that. I’d loaned a coworker money multiple times and he paid me back every time, sometimes with interest.
I guess I was cheaper than the payday loan places.
I made a purchase on a sketchy site (during Covid when things were hard to find). A day or so later, some unauthorized transactions were made on my card. “Bank” called from actual number of my bank, to verify if I actually made the transactions. provided some of my personal information, transaction amount etc then asked to verify ssn. It was very convincing.
Luckily I refused because I know anyone can call you claiming to be any number, and I didn’t give out any info, and said I would call back that number (my bank).
Bank had no knowledge of a call.
15 minutes later, get real fraud department call from my bank. They just wanted to know if it was fraud or not and didn’t ask for any other info.
Moral of the story: if someone calls you, never give out personal info. Tell them you will call back if needed.
My bank sometimes call me with questions about verification, as I travel a lot and have weird purchase patterns that can span several continents over a few days.
But it’s easy for me to verify that it’s them: Not only is Norwegian a rare language among Nigerian princes, but I use a tiny local bank so I recognize them by the dialect.
And even if it were a scam verification, they only ask for relatively inconsequential information, such as how much I have in my savings account, where I use my card the most, and roughly how much is paid into my account by my employer every month.
It’s supposed to be getting better, but moving very slowly.
spoofing is pretty common still afaik.
How do you even spoof numbers? just say “oh my number is 1234 not 5678 ignore that is from 5678”
When I was 16 I looked a bit older, so people would often assume I was over 18.
I was in Boston one day wandering around and I was approached by someone who wanted to give me a free personality test or something. He was handsome and I was a young gay boy so I figured why not?
It ended up being a scientology recruitment. They freaked and stopped trying to hard sell me their book when I told them I was 16. And their recruitment video had me laughing like crazy as I walked out.
I didn’t know how crazy of a cult they are at the time. But it was a funny experience.
