I’ve not seen this one before, but I’ve heard of it. Scammers set up a booth in a local mall that purports to be selling chances at winning fabulous prizes while raising money for a charity, but what they’re really selling are tickets to the poor house. Check it:
As always it’s pays to be aware of the scams you might come across.
Via Geeks are Sexy.
Interesting video, and, yes, a very believable scam. I thought it was interesting that the mark actually thought it might be bogus, but then dismissed it.
One peeve of mine, though: the voice-over at the end calls it “identity theft” (as do you, in the tags). It’s not. It’s just plain fraud. They’re not collecting information to get new credit on his behalf (they’d need things like his SSN and birth date for that). They’re “just” stealing his money.
It annoys me that we’ve created a new class of fraud that we call “identity theft”, and that we then start tossing many kinds of fraud into that bucket, inappropriately.
Why is Christianity (or Islam or Hindu or insert belief here) so easy to sell? There’s that carrot (salvation or a vacation), that appearance of legitimacy (a church or a booth in a mall), and, of course, that authority figure (a priest or a manager). And when the professionals are trained and well versed in human weaknesses, how could they fail to make a convert (or fool the mark)?
Now if only they had some truth to back them up . . .