Tag: scams

At least TRY to rob me

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

Watch: once this post goes live, I’ll get another email, and this whole thing will turn out to have been real, only now I’ve pissed her off.

Suddenly it occurs to me that the fact that there has been a delay in this person replying to me is actually evidence for it being real. Surely, surely I’m not actually being ghosted by a scammer, right? These people are nothing if not persistent.

At any rate: last week I got an email from someone purporting to be an Editorial Director at a publishing group that shall remain nameless, as will the actual person. That person showered several paragraphs of praise upon The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 and then asked me what my future plans were for the series and whether I currently had representation. Which, obviously, I don’t, seeing as how I haven’t written a single word of fiction since Covid hit.

The praise felt a lot like AI. Which, y’know, suspicious, especially when coming from someone who was purportedly an editor.

I did some research. The publishers were legit and the person was a real person. I allowed myself to get excited for a moment, then noticed that the email address was clearly not from any kind of official work email. A personal email address? Maybe, but it added additional tingles to the Spider-sense. Plus there was no actual promise of anything in the email, or was there actually an ask, so if this was a scam, they had multiple steps planned for it.

I went to LinkedIn. The editor was there, too. I dug up the work email and sent a quick message: a more polite version of hi, is this real?

I got an immediate response saying that the person had retired in December and that the email address was going to be shut down in January. It is May; clearly this did not happen. LinkedIn made no mention of being retired and the website of the company still refers to this person as if they are currently employed.

Also, this provided a reason for the personal email, right? Maybe they’re retired, but not retired-retired, if that makes any sense.

So I did two things, wanting to see where this was going, especially if I could get some posts out of it: I responded politely and with some interest to the original email address, but I also sent a message to the person’s LinkedIn, with a brief explanation of the situation and basically saying Hey, I don’t quite trust this, would you mind letting me know if it’s real?

And now it’s several days later, and I haven’t heard from either of them. The editor doesn’t appear to be especially active on LinkedIn, and their messaging system is opaque at best, especially concerning messages from people you aren’t already connected with, so that’s not terribly surprising, but I was expecting a pretty quick response from the original email– either you’re real, so you’re looking forward to hearing from me, or you’re not, in which case you’re still interested in … whatever it was you had in mind in the first place. I’m still not completely clear on the angle, to be honest.

It also occurred to me that whoever sent the email very well might be monitoring the blog, so maybe an explanation is the post from the day it happened saying I thought I was being scammed? Maybe they just dropped it at that point, realizing it was futile.

Either way, this didn’t end up being nearly as entertaining as I wanted it to be, dammit.

Help me out here

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Does anybody know what this thing is? Several of them have popped up on intersections near me; I’m pretty certain they aren’t cameras because, well, they don’t look like cameras and some of them are on intersections that definitely do already have obvious cameras. There also tend to be just one or two per intersection and so they aren’t covering all four directions. I mean, it looks like a bell, but as far as I can tell they don’t make any noise and why the hell would anyone be mounting bells on the roads at intersections anyway?

I was dead to the world by 8:00 PM last night, and considered making it twice in a row tonight. I can’t explain it; I am genuinely not having bad days at work by any standard but my god am I coming home exhausted. I’m back to wondering if signing up for summer school was a mistake again, but I still feel like passing up all that money for a job I’ll be done with by noon every day is a horrendously poor decision.

In other news, I got an email today that is almost certainly a scam. I’m following up on it; if it’s a scam, it’s a quite detailed one and I’m going to follow it down the rabbit hole until the part where they ask me for money just for the lulz. If I’m wrong and it’s not a scam, it’s big news, but obviously nothing I can share just yet.

(It’s gonna be a scam. It’s definitely a scam. But at least I’ll get a post or two out of it.)

In which shopping for clothes somehow gets even worse

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Every shirt I have that is okay to wear to work is at least three years old, so I’m starting to face the uncomfortable truth that I’m going to have to do some clothes shopping before this school year starts.

(Fun fact: I have two polo shirts that date back to my first teaching job. They are twenty-five years old. They somehow still fit and they do not, in any way, look their age. I promise I’d have tossed them by now if they had gotten ratty.)

Anyway, the tl;dr of this post is that it’s astonishing how many clothes websites are scams, and I came across an especially crispy example of the genre today. I’ve been scammed twice by clothing websites before, and I’m at the point now where before I order from any website I’m not familiar with I Google the name of the site and look for drama. If I find it, they don’t get my money. I saw a shirt I liked in an ad on a website I go to a lot (honestly, I’m at the point where “advertises on websites” is a reason to suspect fuckery is afoot) and clicked on it, and it wasn’t twenty seconds later before I decided the site was a joke.

That shirt above isn’t the shirt I clicked on, but take a look at that picture. There is no fucking way that’s a picture of a real shirt. Like, I’m not bothered by the idea that they might have dropped a model in front of a beach; that’s whatever, but that entire image is AI, and it’s not even fucking good AI. Look at the bottom seam of the shirt. It looks like plastic, and the colors on the entire thing are way too saturated to be real. The collar looks suspicious as hell, too.

This is so obviously a scam– and, upon doing my due diligence, the clothes ship direct from China, because of course they do– that I’m honestly tempted to order that shirt just to compare whatever I get– some cobwebs in a Zip-Loc bag is my guess– to the original image.

Shopping for clothing online, at least for anything more complicated than a T-shirt, was already ludicrous for a whole host of reasons, but it’s gotten to the point where I’m going to have to refuse to shop anywhere other than Amazon or brick and mortar places, and there aren’t a lot of brick and mortar places left that carry my size that aren’t ludicrously expensive.

Slightly related, I got an email from my district earlier today that spirit wear for 2025-26 was available, and went to take a look. Feel free to look around on the site for me bitching about my salary; I know there are plenty of issues with teacher pay, but I personally feel like I’m well-compensated for my work, but they still don’t pay me enough that I’m going to drop $60 on a fuckin’ polo shirt. If I’m wearing a shirt with the logo of the organization I work for, that shirt should be cheap or free. Not more expensive than any other shirt of that style I own.

Anyway, point is, you’ll get a post soon enough where I’m bitching about clothes I actually bought, instead of websites that expect me to send them money so they can send me a bag of ebola. Something for y’all to look forward to.

Haha LOL you go to hell

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reviews1 Comment

You might remember a post about some new shoes I ordered a couple of weeks ago, and how before the shoes had even been shipped much less arrived in my home the company was hassling me about becoming a “brand ambassador” for them, to the point where I eventually dropped the name of their company into my spam filter.

Well, they have committed two additional sins since then: first, the shoes shipped directly from China, which, well, I’m fully aware that a number of the goods I use on a daily basis originated there, but each and every time I’ve gotten a tracking number and it’s been from a Chinese shipping company I’ve had to brace myself to either receive nothing at all or to get a piece of fucking junk. I’m fairly sure that’s been a literally universal experience. Every single time.

Then I did something I really should have done before ordering the shoes, and Googled reviews of the company, and to put it charitably they are utter shit. I have got to learn how to deal with any new company that I’ve never ordered anything from online; I’ve gotten caught up in stupid shit too damn many times at this point and I’m too old to be this Goddamn dumb.

Today, the shoes showed up. These fuckers didn’t even put the shoes in shoeboxes. There are literally four shoes wrapped up in a polybag and taped up.

I’m not even opening the packaging; I’ve already initiated the return. It’s gonna cost me a few bucks to ship them back and I’m anticipating additional bullshit once they receive them (the refund is apparently contingent upon “inspection” of the product once the return center, which is in Utah, receives it) but I feel like “the package was literally never even opened and I’m returning these because I hate you” is about as ironclad a reason to return something as I can give them. If I didn’t open the damn package, it’s hard to suggest I ruined the shoes.

So, yeah. Fuck Gatsby Shoes. Don’t give them your money or your email address. That’s me being a brand ambassador right there.

I remain open for actual brand ambassadorship if Kizik decides they need a fat Internet guy to hawk their shoes, though.

Scam alert

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

Don’t use Noom. Don’t go to their website and don’t download their app. I have never encountered a more blatantly money-hungry service in my life, and this thing went from “this might be useful to me” to “this is the 30th time you’ve offered me something in return for additional money, I’ve said no, and you’ve instantly discounted it and asked again five seconds later, and you still haven’t shown me this personalized plan you’re supposedly crafting” in no time flat. There’s already one unauthorized charge on my card and they were doing their damnedest to railroad me into another when I backed out of the whole thing and demanded a refund. I’ll call the bank tomorrow to contest all of the charges.

In other news, my back hurts, I was in a training all day (and will be for the next two as well) and I am not in the mood for this.

In which I fight evil

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics2 Comments

It was a good day. It was a stressful day– I was fully expecting someone to die somewhere because of the inauguration, and I may have more thoughts on it later. But it appears that everything went off without any violence, and the right-wing goon squad seems to have dried up and blown away without the Asshole encouraging them on Twitter. Hopefully it will stay that way.

I had a Thing happen, though, unrelated to the inauguration, and if you don’t mind I’m just going to embed a bunch of Tweets because I’d tell the story the same way here anyway.

(These appear to have embedded obnoxiously, which I apologize for, but hopefully a single click will take you straight to Twitter, where you can read these and view the images in native format.)

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352039314776068098
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352039563313745920
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352039843921080320
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352040282443939840
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352040572509368322
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352040810578120711
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352041885825642498
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352042001672396803

What particularly annoys me about this is that when I’m daydreaming about winning the lottery, the specific way in which I fantasize about being ultra-rich is that I want to set up a charitable foundation, and part of the way I want to use the funds for my charitable foundation is by flitting around the Internet and randomly and anonymously completely fulfilling people who post GoFundMes and various and sundry other “I’m getting evicted, please send me money” types of things. And I can imagine a world where I might actually just do a Twitter search for “credit card debt,” and then ask for Venmo addresses so I can send folks money. So I decided to take this seriously until it proved to be a scam (which was what I expected) or I somehow got $3K from the money fairy on Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day, which trust me, was about to be taken as an omen.

Instead, hopefully I got to ruin a scammer’s day. I mean, probably not, but I hope at least BoA zaps that account and Twitter bans Annette. Either way, all in a day’s work, I guess.

Scam alert update

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

It has been pointed out to me that the suspect checkout interface I pointed out yesterday is apparently the base checkout screen for the Shopify platform, and I had a couple of people show me legit websites that they’ve used repeatedly that use that platform. I’m going to slightly back off and modify my claim from yesterday, from a flat “avoid” to a “back out and do some research.” I’m also going to echo Elisabeth’s comment from yesterday that another thing these shitty sites have in common is Facebook and Instagram ads. You’re probably all familiar with this phenomenon; you click on one ad, sometimes by accident, or sometimes just linger over one too long and suddenly you have ads featuring the exact same pictures from several different sites.

I have a policy now; if I recognize a photo of a piece of merchandise from another ad, I start reporting every single ad where I see that photo as a scam. I have threatened to do this before and not followed through, but I’m closer than I’ve ever been to shutting down both Facebook and Instagram for good. I have here, TikTok and Twitter; that really ought to be enough social media for everyone.

Not much else going on today, but I thought I’d point all that out.

WARNING: Scam Alert

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

If you happen to be doing some Christmas shopping, and you’re at a website you’re not familiar with, and their checkout screen looks like it uses this template:

Back out immediately and do not make the purchase, as the site is likely a scam. Note that in this particular case I’ve added this item at random to create a shopping cart, but I have reversed a charge against Helli Shop, as it’s become more and more clear that they never intend to ship me the dice I ordered and upon closer examination (which I finally did today, after disputing the charge with my credit card company) the vast majority of their wares appear to have images stolen from other sites, including occasionally actually leaving the watermarks from the other sites on the image.

Why am I warning you about the template and not about the specific site? I’ve made one other order from a (different) site with this exact same template, and the item I ordered did arrive, but it was junk, and it shipped direct from China. Helli sent me tracking information six weeks ago using the same Chinese shipper, and the tracking information hasn’t moved from “item ready for shipment” since then. Those dice are never coming.

(It’s only $30, so if my bank refuses it’s not the end of the world, but I’m also changing some passwords too.)

Today, I was looking into a Christmas present for my wife, and noted that the template for checkout was the same. I backed out and did some more research on the site, and sure enough, all sorts of reports of either never receiving the items they’d ordered or in one case receiving what was supposed to be a “king-size” blanket that ended up being the size of a napkin. I also chased down a couple of the reviews from major magazines that they’d claimed to have for their product, and sure enough none of them seemed to actually exist.

So, yeah. Buyer beware, or even better, don’t be a buyer in the first place. I’d guess if I looked into it more deeply that all three sites would turn out to be registered by the same people, and they’re using this template for all of their stores. Avoid.

(Note, for those of you coming in through a link, that there is an update to this post.)