2y ago

Have you ever gotten scammed, package stolen, or been a victim of fraud in any way?

I just got my package of new earphones from Best Buy, and the box was fucking empty. I mean there is the box and instruction manuals and charging cable, but the actual earphones aren't there. They've used Shipt (which is like a doordash but for packages) but the box was inside another layer of packaging which was supposedly sealed before the delivery person got it so I'm leaning towards it being store employee theft, or someone returned an empty box and the employees didn't verify it.

I'll be contacting Bestbuy and Credit Card issuer as soon as customer support hours start.

I've literally never lost a package, I'm just so, annoyed. The money will probably be back, but like dude I just wanna listen to some music. Ugh... I guess phone speakers will have to do for now.

PSA: Record a video when opening packages just in case you need to file a dispute. I didn't but I don't think there's gonna be an issue since these things rarely happen to me and disputes are rarely filed.

So have you ever been defrauded?

Update: I used the customer support chat and told BestBuy about it, and they gave me a replacement, this time I picked it up at the store and opened the box right in front of the employee just to be safe. Nothing was missing this time. 😀

48 comments

I once thought "Amazon refurbished" was a program by Amazon...
Turns out they just throw that label on random companies that refurbished on their own.
Bought a cellphone from one, they sent me the wrong phone model, and I paid for unlocked and they sent me one locked to a different carrier, then said that carrier was the most popular (it's not) and they assumed it was what I wanted.
When I was complaining about that, they told me all I had to do was put it in a UPS drop box, explicitly told me I didn't have to go to a store.
According to them, they never got the return.
I talked to Amazon, and their customer service just flat out lied and told me they could see the return was in transit.
Weeks later Amazon tried to charge me for the phone, and I had to do a charge back. Because apparently following the sellers instructions to put it in a drop off, meant I couldn't prove I mailed it.
I have no idea if I was sent the wrong phone intentionally as a scam where they were always going to say they didn't get the return, but it definitely felt like it by the end of it
- I would bet they just didn't care if it was the right phone or not.

A few weeks ago I shipped a package USPS and I wanted to track it's progress. I googled USPS tracking and clicked on the first link that popped up. The search result looked like the USPS website and said USPS .com and had the same preview text that the actual website used but it was actually a Google ad that redirected me to supertracking .com. This fake website looked exactly like the USPS tracking website, the domain the web browser displayed was wrong but everything on the page was right, the buttons on the bottom and top even sent you back to the official USPS site. The fake site was set up so that no matter what you entered it would say the address was wrong and you had to update it for a $1.50 address update fee. I would have grown suspicious here except I actually did put the wrong zip code down when I shipped it. Again all the forms looked legit so I put my credit card info in after updating the address, then it wanted me to confirm my bank account login and pin. This is where I stopped because there is no reason for them to collect that data. I saw it was the wrong website and looked back in my history and sure enough I clicked on an ad without realizing it. I reported the domain, reported the ad, and cancelled my credit card. It was really scary how real the website felt, I didn't suspect anything until they wanted bank info.
- These ads are getting so much more prevalent, and so much more subtly marked. Google (and places like reddit and Facebook) designs them to feel as much like organic content as possible. I have a pihole on my home network, in part to prevent exactly the type of mistake you described.
  
  One way that google explicitly enables these types of scams is by allowing advertisers to display a fake url in the ad footer. Ostensibly this is so advertisers can link to an intermediary 3rd-party tracking url instead of the target page without scaring the customers, but this is precisely what allows scammers to display uspscom in the link to a fraud site. Google even uses javascript to display the fake url in the browser tooltip when you hover over the link!
- I switched to Kagi the other day and it’s fantastic compared to Google now. I haven’t gotten bad results a single time.

Several years ago, my credit card number was used to buy airplane tickets on a different continent. No big deal, right? I disputed the transaction with my credit card company and expected that to be the end of it. By the way, I had the card in my possession the whole time.
They wrote back and said they confirmed that the charge was legitimate, made in person, and I was responsible for the total amount.
I asked how they confirmed it (they never answered that) and explained that it was very hard for me to be 1/3 of the way across the planet while also making purchases at home such as gas and groceries. I was at work, made purchases with their card at the same time, and had toll booth records — lots of supporting evidence that I never went there to make the purchase.
It didn’t matter, they stuck to the story that it was made in person and was authentic. One of the letters from them said that they had asked the airline who in turn told them I was there doing it in person, but that was the only hint at the process I got.
I’m upset but busy with life, new baby, work, etc. so about a week goes by and another letter comes from them saying that my dispute was successful and I don’t owe the money. It was short, had very little information, and there was no answers to any of the questions I’d asked (questions about the bank policy for disputes, if the decision is final, how they verified I was in another country, how they know my card was there).
In the end, I got my money back but no closure on what happened. It was six years ago and I still feel frustrated about it.
- My guess is someone at the credit card company screwed up. May have even been someone new.

my partner, her friend and I traveled to another city 4 hours away to go see a musical. my partner found the accomodation on booking.com
when we got to where the apartment should be, we couldn't find it. we looked around for ages to no avail. found a police station nearby. we asked them if they knew of the address. they pointed to the building across the street they said had been abandoned for 5 years. when we tried to call the host it went thru to an international phoneline in a different language.
oof

I ordered a Noctua CPU cooler from Amazon a few years ago. It was sold to me as new, and it definitely looked new, but when I opened the package to the it out and install it, it was missing several components. It had obviously been opened and either used or at least taken apart, then put back in the packaging.
I didn't feel scammed necessarily, but it was extremely annoying. I had no trouble with Amazon taking it back and sending me a new one. Honestly the only reason I think you'd have trouble is if your account has a history of questionable or large returns.
- If it's sold by Amazon, Amazon will eat the cost on most stuff and allow returns for pretty much anything
  If it's "fulfilled by Amazon" they can't just eat the cost. Either the seller or buyer has to pay.
  It can be hard to tell which is which before buying.
  
  On Amazon's website. Directly below the "Add to Cart" and "Buy it Now" buttons it tells you exactly who is selling it and who is shipping it. I'm not sure where the difficulty lies in checking?

I've had FedEx deliver my package to a vacant neighborhood home. By the time I went to get the package, it was gone. FedEx did a "thorough" investigation and found that they delivered it correctly. I appealed and never got my money back.
- FedEx is the absolute worst, it’s amazing that I feel a sense of dread just by looking at who ships the things I buy online.

About 20 years ago I spent about $2k on a piece of electronic music gear on eBay. I was just out of university and this was a huge sum for me. It soon turned out that it was a fraudulent listing. This guy had gotten access to his girlfriend's eBay account and posted a bunch of high value auctions and stole the money. A bunch of us victims were in touch and commiserating about our bad fortune. However, this story has a happy ending. The police got involved and were able to recover the money!
- How long it took to get the money back tough?
  
  I honestly don't remember at this point, but I think the whole ordeal took something like 6 months. It was definitely under a year.

In the early days of smartwatches I ordered one from the manufacturer directly. The price tag and its features all sounded too good to be true, and it was. I don't even remember their name but I was so hyped that I didn't even do basic research.
I waited and waited and after a few weeks I did a search online. Turns out the whole thing was a scam, I found tons of blog posts about people either not receiving theirs or getting something that barely worked.
It was too late to do anything about it but I learned my lesson the hard way.
- Did you dispute the charges with your bank?
  
  No, at the time I didn't know that it was possible to dispute a charge.

On my wedding night, one of my vendors decided to go on a shopping spree with my credit card. I guess he hoped that there would be so many charges that I wouldn't notice. I didn't remember shopping for car parts while I was saying "I do". Credit card refunded the charges. I actually got them the address that the purchases were shipped to but they didn't care.

Been the victim of fraud. Unfortunately - yes.
When I was younger and Chip 'n' PIN was becoming popular, many smaller shops had a Paypoint machine that would print the entire card number and CCV on the receipt. I was so paranoid about fraud, especially given that there was sufficient information printed on the receipt that anyone could do an Amazon order with those details. I used to get a black permanent marker and scribble the details out before putting the receipt in the bin.
Imagine my horror when a decade later, I learn that I have been the victim of fraud, and a type of fraud it was entirely impossible for me to prevent. In the UK fraudsters watch for new companies popping up on Companies House and then use the details to go on a shopping spree. The way it works is like this:
They see my name, address and date of birth on the website. They are looking for a name that matches their surname and first initial. So for me that could be Alexander Jones for example. They go to a retail park and pop into Argos. They order several thousand pounds of stuff. When they go to pay, the person at the counter helpfully asks "Do you have an Argos credit card? If you apply for one today, we'll transfer the balance of today's purchases to the card" and armed with my address, date of birth and name, and a card that already has the same surname and first initial as me - they are accepted for an Argos credit card. Post nothing for the goods they just bought and leave the store. They go next door to JJB sports, and then whole process repeats. "Do you have a JJB sports card? If you get one today...."
They visited 6 stores in an hour and repeated this process at all of them. And a week later I start receiving credit cards.....
It's a surprisingly common scam (or it was), brought on entirely by the shops bring pushed to get people to sign up for credit cards.....
I had to be on a register for several years, so if anyone tried to open an account or take out credit in my name, I would get a phone call to check if it was actually me.
- Why in the world are you allowed to take out credit cards for so little information? In the US you _must _ give a social security number and then a credit check is done. It happens all at the register and can take a few minutes. You don’t just get automatically approved.

One time someone booked a European vacation using my debit card number. My bank didn’t catch it, but I called their fraud department and got it sorted out.
Another time the same bank blocked my card when I tried to make a purchase at Best Buy on Black Friday. They’re really bad at fraud detection.
- Lol you just inspired me to make a meme: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/830908
  
  hahaha love it!

Only on Runescape, it taught me enough for life.
My ex-gf was almost victim to one of the Nintedo Switch selling sites when there was a shortage. They constantly changed domains and had it really professional looking, but buying anything from scalpers is risky especially when it looks too good to be true like that.
- There are some insanely well thought scams on runescape

Yeah. Had the time-card printout showing four hours of overtime. No overtime on my paycheque. Like an idiot, I gave my manager the printout so he could "investigate". Yeah, never got paid for those four hours.
- My advice is, always keep the original and give your employer the copy of any evidence. Only give the original to a court when it gets to a legal proceeding. (Even then, you still keep an extra copy for yourself. Courts don't typically lose evidence, but an extra copy doesn't hurt.)

I once bought a computer game at Walmart, I believe it was the original Sims game. Anyway when I got to the car I opened the package because I wanted to read the manual on the way home. I opened the package and see that the manual and everything else is there, except for the game itself. Luckily I was still in the Walmart parking lot, so I was able to go in and exchange it, but it was still annoying.

A couple of years ago, I was a Canadian travelling in Silicon Valley. I hadn't yet acquired any USD but was hungry and went to a mall food court. I was surprised when they wouldn't accept Apple Pay. This place was not far from Cupertino (Apple headquarters). They didn't even use chip-and-pin, which is ubiquitous in Canada and even everywhere I've been in Mexico. Instead, they swiped the magnetic strip and made my sign a screen with a stylus.
Well, next thing you know, I'm getting fraudulent charges on my card from Las Vegas. I immediately called the bank and they locked it down. Fortunately, I had another card on me but was super paranoid to use it after that.

This is why we always use a credit card to purchase anything, right?
Post office: box was sliced and someone stuck their hand in and removed contents and successfully reclosed. We learned: 1. do not bring attention to your box
- We learned: 1. do not bring attention to your box (stickers and cute doodles? = Fun stuff inside) 2. Insure your boxes and contents 3. Never send anything irreplaceable, like family heirlooms 4. Use those boring, same as every other Flat Rate boxes as much as possible.

Yeah. In working for the public sector, I accepted lower pay in return for a good pension and a sense of doing something worthwhile. Now they've made the pension scheme way worse, my pay is 25% lower in real terms than it was 15 years ago, and everything we do is badly underfunded because they're sending all the money to outsourcers who do not give a shit about anything but their executive pay packets.
And muggins is still here because even though the bastards will (almost) inevitably win, I want to fight the fuckers anyway.

Needed office for my Mac, internet was terrible and I couldn’t find it legitimately to download anywhere (these were the days before Office 365)
Took a shot at an eBay listing, got sent a burned DVD with an OEM product key written on it sharpie
It worked, but I wasn’t particularly happy

It's always electronics. I bought a screen replacement for my phone and it didn't work. Second time was when they sent me a broken webcam.

My first time was a long time ago at CompUSA (RIP). I purchased a joystick (like for flight sims) took it home, and found only the heavy power brick in the box. It took me at least 45 minutes of arguing at the store to get them to give me a replacement. Eventually I had to get a new box from their shelf and show them there was no plastic tape seal thing on new boxes to demonstrate that mine likely didn't have one when I bought it either.
I've also had brand name micro SD cards from Amazon several years ago when things had just started to go down hill there. They had their capacity faked despite the packaging and seller looking legitimate. It may have been when they had "fulfilled by amazon" meant Amazon just treated all stock like Amazon's general stock. If I sold a widget via Amazon stored in a Chicago warehouse and a fraud sold the same widget stored in a warehouse in NY, a NYC customer could order the widget from my store page and Amazon would just ship the one in NY because it was closer to the buyer and cheaper for Amazon to ship. I'd get a fraud complaint even though it wasn't my product that was fraudulent.
Maybe 5-10 years ago someone used my credit card number, in a shopping center I frequent, to make a bunch of purchases at stores I've never visited (women's fashion accessories). I reported this to my credit card company and they removed the charges without any complaint. I guess they managed to get the card info and my zip from a data leak and figured purchases in my zip code would be less likely to be flagged.
I've sure there may have been a few times where I was none the wiser.

I've recently had my plate cloned, got 2 NIPs (Notice of Intended Prosecution) from Met Police for speeding and 2 PCNs (Penalty Charge Notice) for driving in a bus lane and not paying the ULEZ (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) charge. Fortunately the car they used my plate on was a different generation/facelift, so hopefully they accept my disputes without issues.

48 comments