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 shared 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
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.
Image credits: shadesofbloos
#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.
Image credits: kenreimers
#3
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.
Image credits: shotsallover
#4
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.
Image credits: Revolutionary-Yak-47
#5
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.
Image credits: schaudhery
#6
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.
Image credits: SyCoCyS
#7
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.
Image credits: SayNoToStim
#8
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.
Image credits: Erlian
#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.
Image credits: SoftLavenderX_
#10
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.
Image credits: pennyauntie
#11
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.
Image credits: shadowmib
#12
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.
#13
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.
Image credits: Look__See
#14
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.
Image credits: Terpsichorean_Wombat
#15
Anyone remember that whole Honey thing from just like... a month or two ago? Well... that made me realize that whole thing was a load of bs.
xternal7:
Honey is a browser extension for coupons. When shopping online, Honey claims it'll search the internet for coupons that give you the best deal.
... except that online retailers can partner with Honey and ensure that it won't actually show you the coupon codes that give you the highest discount codes.
And then there's also the bit where it steals affiliate links.
Dracious:
Yeah, the whole thing was scummy and unethical, but I gotta respect the grift and how blatant it was.
Basically paying influencers to push your product (that they didn't research before pushing) onto their users, but the product effectively robs those same influencers of the income they would get from their users in the future.
That's pretty wild.
Image credits: UrMomsSweetAss
#16
The first time I saw a kid spit take a Mr. Beast bar then reach for some gummy candy brand that some other Youtuber made barely two seconds later while I begged them to just pick a normal candy brand, I realized the YTers and TikTokers selling cheap s**t was gonna take over the world.
Image credits: sleightofhand0
#17
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.
Image credits: driftingfornow
#18
Weddings. Everything about a wedding is incredibly overpriced and so far booked out for no real reason.
Image credits: MiPaKe
#19
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.
Image credits: Nat_StarTrekin
#20
In grad school I had an amazing Economics Professor (RIP Dr Looney). If we had a few minutes left at the end of class he would basically do an AMA.
One classmate asked about gold as an alternative to protect against money printing. His answer "If my dollars are so evil and your gold is so good, why would you ever trade your gold for my dollars?"
A second student essentially asked about private equity investments. He responded that he gets offered them all the time. "They are always 'cant miss' and 'guaranteed wins' but for some reason they also always require my money. If they deal is as good as you say it is, why would you every want to let me get most of the profit?"
Pretty much every "alternative investment" is a scam.
#21
The stock market.
That s**t is literally made up and not based on any actual financial principles. Want proof? Tesla has a market cap of $912 billion dollars. Tesla, who makes most of its profits not from actually selling cars but from selling regulatory credits somehow is deemed more valuable than:
Toyota, Honda, GMC (GM), Chevy (GM), Cadillac (GM), Buick (GM), Volkswagen, Volvo, Mercedes Benz, Hyundai, Jeep (Stellantis), Ram Trucks (Stellantis), Fiat (Stellantis), Opel (Stellantis), Peugeot (Stellantis), Dodge (Stellantis), Chrysler (Stellantis), Alfa Romeo (Stellantis), Opel (Stellantis), BMW, Ferrari, Porsche, Hyundai, Ford, and Mazda.
***COMBINED***
That's right: Wall Street has determined that the car company that doesn't make money selling cars is somehow worth more than basically the entire auto industry combined. Furthermore, in 2024 Tesla revenue was $98 billion. GM's revenue in 2024 was $187 billion, almost 2x more than Tesla. And yet, Telsa is "valued" almost 22x more than that of GM, despite the fact that Tesla only sold about as many cars as Audi.
The game is rigged.
#22
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.
Image credits: Weird-Statistician
#23
Fabric softener is nothing but a perfume for your clothes. It does nothing else.
Image credits: Ensia
#24
These days? Sadly thrift stores. They've completely abandoned the reasons most of them are in business (charity) and decided that "charity" now means abandoning helping those in need and outright actively scamming because they're mad some people came in and flipped product in the 2010s.
I rarely see items below 60-70% of retail. That's already too high for basics like clothing that have a wear factor to their utility (it **might** be ok for things like Pyrex but still doesn't incentivize turnover which should matter in this kind of business). But I also regularly see items well above 100% of retail both with tags and without.
It's pretty shady to walk into a Goodwill and see a WalMart $4.97 tag on an item the store is asking $8 for.
Image credits: MJDiAmore
#25
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.
#26
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.
Image credits: cinnapear
#27
Nfts.
The whole idea is so stupid yet some few made a metric ton of money that some poor gullible people.
Image credits: mudokin
#28
Mobile gaming. It's been like this for probably a decade now that mobile gaming is just psychologically designed to give you just enough satisfaction at first, but keep you wanting more and locking stuff behind paywalls or extremely long timers. It's near impossible to get where you want without dumping money for in game currency and stuff. Mobile games are designed to the core to be addictive and siphon money from people. So many people still play them. I can't touch them anymore and haven't for years.
Image credits: PM_ME_HAIRY_HOLES
#29
Subscription based anything. Why am I paying Amazon to let me buy things from Amazon? The movie selection sucks a*s, and if I buy something one month, great.. I might save on shipping... but if I don't buy anything or watch a movie for a month I still pay them anyway? WTF?
Image credits: misterdudebro
#30
I had a too-good-to-be-true feeling about streaming services pretty early on. When interest rates started going up I thought “oh boy, here come the ads, price jacks, and quality drop”. So far 2 have become true, time will tell if quality stays good over time.
Image credits: marmot1101
#31
For profit university was running a recruitment company. They would give you a list of jobs you were “almost” qualified for, then offer classes and certification to get the jobs. They were all thousands of dollars for a few hours training in docketing software or something similar. Later that school was bought out by University of Phoenix.
Image credits: DeLaRey
#32
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?
Image credits: yankinwaoz
#33
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.
Image credits: soap22
#34
Celebrity awards are all purchased. I knew they campaigned for the Oscar’s, but I did not realize that you can purchase things like the NAACP award or the Pat Tillerson award.
dorktasticd:
Lawyer/legal industry awards are the worst for this!
Image credits: lsp2005
#35
Super high end jeans are made in Northern Mariana Islands. As a US territory, the brand can claim their jeans are made in the USA, based on that technicality. These contractors making $500 jeans are making them in the same factories as WalMart branded jeans, which sell for about $15.
#36
AI artwork and writing. It emphasizes the ‘artificial’ and minimizes the ‘intelligence’ of the creators and the audience.
GreenOnionCrusader:
ESPECIALLY for canning books. If you want to get into canning, go with a trusted source. (Like Ball, their entire business is canning, so they can teach you how to do it safely.) AI cookbooks have had some downright dangerous and deadly advice for people looking to can their own food. Know your source and never blindly trust a cookbook not to k**l you.
#37
I bought a 256GB micro SD card off Amazon a few years ago. It turned out to be an 8GB card that was fake after I contacted SanDisk about it (they told me the serial number was fake and wasn't a licensed SanDisk product). I paid the 256GB price at the time (which was like $100).
Then after I sent it back, I did some digging on the seller and it turns out there's a metric s**t ton of sellers on Amazon and other web stores selling fake merchandise out there.
#38
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).
#39
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.
#40
TICKETMASTER IS TICKETBASTARD.
#41
Chiropractors are absolutely a scam. I worked for a state agency and they were involved in most of our fraud cases.
#42
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.
#43
When the cashier asks you, "Would you like to round up to give to this charity?"
NEVER do that.
The company is going to use your money to donate it, but it's nothing out of their pocket and then they get a tax return on it. You're literally just giving them extra money.
If you want to donate to a charity, do it yourself. .
#44
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.
#45
Private health insurance in Australia seems to be a ripoff.
I remember when I got surgery on my nose. It had been busted during a high school fight. Ten years later I finally had surgery to fix it at a small private hospital.
Bill time came and it was $2200. (This was 30 years ago!) They wanted to know my health insurer and I told them I didn't have one.
They took the bill back while I was still standing there at the counter and halved it. I wound up paying $1100.
When you count in the fact that I also paid no health insurance for a decade, I came out WAY ahead.
#46
A lot of people still don't realize that Ebay started limiting the look-back time for sold items. You used to be able to look at years of sold listings, now it's some months.
As a result, they've inflated prices all over the place. Unless something sells very regularly, you have sellers judging their prices by sold listings which are in turn inflated because those people don't know better. Anomalous prices are more likely to influence future prices.
I still see a lot of people direct others to base their prices on sold Ebay listings, but the data is skewed and easily manipulated.
Now days there are countless merchants gaming the system. They're selling items to their own dummy accounts in order to inflate prices across the board. They make it appear that people are paying outrageous gouger/scalper prices on things so that real buyers are more willing to pay higher prices. If you see X has been selling for $500, then suddenly the scalper listings for $300 don't seem as crazy, even though the retail was $125.
#47
School pictures!!! My kids just entered school and had their pictures taken. The "packages" you get make no sense. If you want to only get the class photo, you have to buy 49$ multi pack of dozens of your kids head on different fake backgrounds. Want just the digital image? You have to spend 50$ on real pictures before you can buy the digital versions. You cannot just spend 4$ and get one picture. It seems to me like the service is free for elementary schools to put on, or they even get a kickback for it. So it's zero effort for schools to do, which is why it continues. Buts they're so expensive and low quality. It costs 50 cents to print a picture myself. We all have phones and can take our own crappy headshots !! And the photographer is doing 400 kids a day, so why is the markup so high? It's not like it's a professional photo where you get 30 minutes of one on one time (justifying the cost). .
#48
Well .... not so modern as it's been going on for more than 50 years ... most likely more than 100 years, but paying outrageous commission to some real estate agent/broker parasite for dumping your property on the MLS and/or opening the door while spewing, " ... now this is the living room ..." should qualify as a scam in any circumstance.
#49
Not modern and not exactly unexpected but I (29M) went to Vegas for the first time a couple years ago for a music festival and was dumbfounded by how openly scammy and depressing casinos are.
The rows of boomers on slot machines with 1000 yard stares greet you first and then i think i sat down at 1 slot machine for 5 minutes where i inexplicably lost $20. Like straight up to this day I don’t understand the mechanisms of that machine. Then sat at a hold em table where i played decently and won a couple hands but lost on the river 5 times in a row to the dealer. Lost another $50.
Conceptually i had understood that the house always wins but i really thought that was more of a “in the long game” type of thing. Going there and experiencing it firsthand really drove the idea home lol.
#50
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.
#51
I had a "job interview" with what you'd now call an MLM way before they entered the mainstream consciousness.
The interviewer spent the while time talking all this hustle culture b******t, talking about how hard you gotta work if you want to succeed, how it's all down to your network and you need to be a go-getter, you better earn that commission, and all that s**t.
Well, I'm a fiercely introverted person who wasn't very self-motivated at the time, so when I was called into the 1 on 1 with the interviewer I couldn't help myself, I told him I was a bad fit and the didn't sound like it was for me.
To my surprise, his tone *instantly* flipped. He started talking about how it wasn't that hard, how you could work less and still make a good living, how generous the commission structure was at lower levels, so on. Exact opposite of his earlier vibe.
And that flip, that's what made me realize it was a scam. They didn't care about my skills or my drive or my personality. Hard sell or soft touch, they'd do whatever, because all they wanted was for me to buy in. And though I didn't understand the whole scam, I knew that had to be a bad idea.
That's the only interview I've ever walked out of partway through.
#52
This is a little niche, but it fits.
Part of your car is the suspension shock absorber; usually one per wheel. It works by moving a piston with some holes in it through an oil-filled cylinder. One end is attached to the chassis, the other end to the suspension.
If you go to your car and “bounce” the fender (so the chassis moves down, compressing the spring) the chassis will usually move up and down about one and a half times. It is the shock that slows it down. If the shock is broken, the suspension will bounce multiple times until friction in the pivots finally bleed off the energy.
In a racing context, the shock has a lot of influence on handling, and what matters is the force curve the shock produces as it is cycled. That curve must be matched to the suspension to produce maximum grip.
I’m simplifying a lot - I actually [wrote a book](https://ift.tt/yO80PJZ) that goes into much more detail - I’m trying to keep this easy without disappearing down a tech rabbit hole.
Racing shocks can get *very* expensive, but most manufacturers don’t actually tell you the curve the shock makes.
So I got a “shock dyno”, which is a device that measures shocks and provides the curve. And I started dynoing shocks.
What I discovered was a litany of horror. Aside from a couple of reputable brands, most shocks were complete garbage.
And I don’t mean “they made the wrong curve” - that’s more of a tuning issue. I mean things like four shocks with the same part number - supposedly identical - producing four wildly different curves. Adjusters that did nothing, or worked backwards, or controlled the opposite of what they were supposed to do. One set of *very* expensive Super Tuna “magic” shocks had one of the pistons installed upside-down…
I shared this info far and wide… and nobody cared. People still spend money on absolute junk because “if it is a racing part and it’s expensive, it must be good!”.
#53
Any form of roof installed solar that is not paid in full at the time of install.
Specifically talking about 20-30 year solar “leases” and even worse: “Power Purchase Agreements”
Scammy scammy scams.
They prey on people.
They’ll lie and tell you it’s a great investment for your house that the next buyer will love. WRONGGGG couldn’t be more wrong. No buyer wants to take over the next 18 years of your solar lease. You’ll end up having to pay it all off at closing and GUESS WHAT it’s $50k+. Which is absurd because the panels should have cost less than $10k if you had gotten a real company to do it.
Even worse: the systems are usually so poorly designed that they don’t even appreciably lower your electric bill.
So $50k for nothing.
Worse than nothing because you’ll have to spend more money taking them off any time you need to have work done on the roof.
A decent chance too that the solar company that sold you that 20-30 year lease goes out of business and so there’s no one to talk to about your system but someone else bought the leases (but none of the service warranties) and you are still on the hook for the payments regardless of if it works or not, and if you stop paying they have a lien on your house.
SCAM SCAM SCAM SCAM
STAY AWAY FROM “PAYMENT-PLAN” SOLAR
Regular solar, that you pay in full up front: fine. Good, even.
Payment plan solar: SCAM.
#54
Carbon Credits, started digging into them in 2007 and asked some tough questions and got very unsatisfactory answers that made me realize it was all so easy to fake. Years later the Nature Conservancy was outed for double selling credits which was one of tough questions I asked. The response I got at time from carbon credit company reps was basically, we are a big corporation of course you can trust us not to commit fraud. ENRON! Was my reply, the lady got uncomfortable and ended interview soon after.
#55
This is super niche and unrelatable, and maybe not really even a scam but I play Pokemon go and I recently downloaded an app to help with raiding.
My bf, who had used the app for longer than me, pointed out that the accounts that were inviting us were all level 30 with almost no pokemon caught, and they were all using the default avatar
He then also noticed that after the raid, the accounts didn't even catch the raid pokemon (you can see their last caught pokemon on your friends list)
Then we realized that they're not catching the Pokemon because they're not doing the raid, thus saving their raid pass (you get 1 or 2 free passes a day, otherwise they're about $1 each)
This lead us to realize that the company that made the app had also made a ton of bot accounts to artificially inflate the usage of the app; you wouldn't download an app that didn't have available raids to join, and if you're not already on the app you wouldn't be there to post your own raids for others to join.
So by making all these bot accounts, they created the appearance that people were using their app, so that real users would join and post their own raids.
Then I noticed that they have a premium service, where you pay something like $15/month so you don't have to wait in a queue to join the raid. I could see paying it once for a time locked regional raid, then forgetting to cancel the subscription and repeatedly getting charged without really noticing because it's only $15.
*Then* we noticed the name of the company is tiny whale, and if you're unaware, whales in gaming are a small percentage of users that spend the most money in the game. So it was like a pun that they recognize that mainly whales are going to use their app.
It was very interesting figuring everything out real time but typing it, it's pretty boring, haha.
#56
Sports betting. While most people know in a broad sense the house always wins, a lot of people think there's a way to win with sports betting as if it is different than playing cr*ps. Most people don't really understand casinos and online operations will ban you or force you into small bet sizes if you show any ability at making intelligent bets. There are people who get banned even while losing because they make smart bets (ie, your expected value for your bets is out of line for the norm). You will not be allowed to keep winning even if you *could* keep winning. If you're allowed to keep betting, then you are losing.
#57
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.
#58
Pre-school, elementary school, and middle school graduation ceremonies.
WTF? They literally have capes, gowns, and diplomas handed to them now. Even for pre-schoolers!
I graduated HS in 1981. I don't recall anyone one of us having a ceremony before we finished 12th grade. When you finshed one grade, you just simply started the next. There was no big deal. The only thing that would change is that you switched to the different school when you went from elementary, to middle, to high school.
#59
Looking for work about 13 years ago, found a “secret shopper” job that was really just a multistep Western Union scam. Wasn’t really caught up in it but I got a scammy check in the mail before I did anything. Tried to figure out some scheme to be able to cash that check but ended up just shredding it.
EyeoftheRedKing:
Fake check scam. It works like this:
The "company" sends you a check and directs you to either buy equipment you need or to purchase goods from specific online sources (actually owned by the same scam company).
Or sometimes they claim they sent the check for too much and you need to send the difference back.
Either way, you deposit the check, see that the money is available to you, and you spend it/send some back to the company.
After a few weeks or so, the check bounces and now you are on the hook for the money and you are likely to get flagged for fraud and have your account closed.
#60
Pool stores testing your water.
Seriously. You bring a sample in, some poorly trained teenager tests it in a poorly calibrated machine which gives you inaccurate results so they can sell you $100 of chemicals to toss in your pool you might not really need.
Then they tell you to test again a week later and not only is that probably too long between tests if levels aren’t great to begin with, but now you need $100 more in chemicals to correct what the previous round did to your water. Rinse and repeat all summer long.
Buy your own set of reagents in a test kit from Taylor or TFTestKits and go to TroubleFreePool’s Pool School to learn basics of pool chemistry. It’s honestly not hard at all and once you get used to it and your levels under control it’s less time consuming than driving to the pool store and back. Also way way cheaper.
Full disclosure, I make an app and partner with a website in this space on it, but I’m not linking it here since this post is not intended for promotion. Use whatever app (or no app at all) you want, but save yourself the time and money and do this yourself if you have a pool!
Bonus info: pool stores often want you to not choose salt water for your pool (especially when building a pool and the builder is affiliated with a pool store). They know it’s easier to maintain which means fewer trips in to sell you chlorine and other chemicals regularly. Salt water generators are totally worth the up front cost.
Also bleach == chlorine. As long as you aren’t buying some special laundry bleach with additives it’s all the same, just different concentrations. Years ago we had a pool builder tell us bleach would cause problems with reproductive organs and never to put bleach in the pool, and only to ever buy it from the pool store. Maybe they have seen people mix up normal chlorine bleach for stuff with additives and wanted to avoid seeing that again, but this combined with many other red flags (telling us how bad salt water was, and the disaster the pool build itself was) made me assume they were just trying fear tactics to profit from us.
#61
Corporations who gain tax credits by using "diverse" vendors. The program is meant to drive business to small, veteran, or minority owned companies to drive growth and competition across the market for numerous industries. Instead most companies work through a third party to pass through the spend at a slight markup. All your spend looks like it's through a diverse organization, when in truth your just using the same vendors you've always have through an accounting scam. You gain the tax credits to offset the upcharge and you get to claim false prestige. Most vendors now will have their own "sub-company" to qualify your dollars as diverse spend by creating an entity in one of the owners' wives name and passing the invoicing through that shell to qualify.
This does not drive competition or growth across the market with groups who would benefit the most like intended.It's a tax scam with loopholes.
Major corporations do this all the time and large service providers are gaming the system now with subsidiaries.
See: Sodexo vs Sodexo-Magic and why adding Magic Johnsons partnership in name gains Sodexo so much more "revenue" when it's mostly pass-through spend disguised as diverse spend.
#62
The auto sales industry. It’s a normalized scam.
#63
LinkedIn. It's entirely designed to lure you into making connections that will be gatekept from you unless you constantly post rubbish on the platform and/or use their premium services. Don't get me started on the nuclear wasteland that is its "jobs" offering. Or the criminally malicious notification settings designed to spam you with everything everyone did or keep you in the dark about updates on your own posts.
#64
"fine art" portrait studios. Most get people in with a fake contest for a tiny piece of art, then guilt them using their love of their family to get a bigger size. The bigger sizes are WAY over priced. It might cost the studio $200 but sell for $10,000. They use hard sales and your love of your family to squeeze money out of you. I knew someone who bragged that they got $2k out of a homeless woman whose family begged her to save the money.
#65
Live entertainment in the “premiere” theaters in the Midwest that typically get traveling Broadway is an absolute dumpster fire.
There’s troops that claim they’ll do a Polar Express live show with prima ballarinas, and singing and dancing and a whole show. They’ll charge $40 a butt just to get in . Then they’ll get 5 local kids to wear overalls and dance a little and will not sing because they don’t have the rights.
They’ll sell goodie bags for kids and make it seem all nice and instead give them a bag of Oreo minis and an empty mug for hot chocolate and sell it for $25.
I actually got the local news to do a story on it. It’s an entire industry, where many troops will claim to be performing x and then bait and switch something else because they don’t have the rights. (Ex. lord of the Rings orchastra playing the sound track won’t have any of the rights so they’ll say they’re playing things inspired by that soundtrack).
#66
Ever try to get a painting framed? For what should be cost of materials plus 20 bucks will cost you hundreds.
#67
This isn't modern, but it's how I feel about the dieting/wellness industry. I realized it slowly throughout my 20's as I began to talk about my relationship to my body, and every. single. person. I talked to said they felt the same. Like wait, we're all out here hating our body and feeling guilty about food, no matter what size, shape, color, configuration? This can't be real.
I know not *everyone* dislikes their body, but it's damn near close enough that it just doesn't make sense to me anymore. If the standard is so unattainable that everyone falls short, why do we even have that standard?
Also I know there will always be a group of people who truly believe they are superior because they have so much "discipline"--good for y'all. I wasn't given this one wild and precious life to weigh my f*****g oatmeal in the morning.
#68
The auto industry. People going into insane debt to get a new cars. I bought a Yaris for $1k thinking I’d get a new car in just a few months. 6 year later it’s still chugging along and I’ve realized if you drive an expensive car you’re most likely just brainwashed by auto industry marketing.
#69
Health foods - they all contain more processed c**p, chemicals, gums, fillers, flavors and fake sugars or sugar alcohol.
There’s no replacement for eating fresh food and vegetables - invest in yourself not corporations on a race to the bottom.
#70
Luxottica makes basically all the designer sunglasses/eyeglasses you can think of, and owns the stores that sells them.
They even own the companies that make prescription lenses, do the antifog/anti glare coatings, and the optometrists. They even own the companies that make the equipment.
Oakley, ray ban, Gucci, Prada, Chanel, sunglass hut, sears optical, pearle vision, Crizal, Optifog, Essilor Instruments, its all them (and like a hundred more)
They have something like 80% market share, it's practically a monopoly, and are able to dictate pricing for the entire market.
Non-Lux brands can be literally 1/10th the price for the same product.
#71
I wrote about this recent negative experience with a chain dental office called Ideal Dental in more detail here.
But the TL;DR is that this place, and I gather other places like it, make up fake dental problems to treat and charge patients for, and try to coerce them to agree to these unnecessary treatments by withholding basic care like cleanings and check-ups. They also apparently bill insurance and Medicaid for services not actually received, tell patients that services are covered when they aren’t (resulting in unexpected bills after the fact), and a variety of other highly unethical practices.
#72
When Nvidia decided to do their RTX line. There is no real progression now, only what they decide the balance of ray tracing cores and regular raster cores will be for the next gen.
They could have brought out a card that did only raytracing right from the start, and it would be more capable of the 5090 at raytracing. People basically getting deluded by the concept of linear progression because that's how it's always been.
It's like taking 20 years to create an electric car by making 20 generations of hybrids in between. Nvidia 100% have planned this out in advance to wring out the consumer of every f*****g dime for no reason... And I think we've barely reached the midpoint.
This is how the industry works now for everything - never give all the features in one. You gotta plan decades ahead to keep adding new stuff to each new generation to give a reason for customers to upgrade.
They don't give a s**t about gamers and are fleecing the entire computer and gaming industry, and have them wrapped around their fingers and not a single tech bro seems awake enough to call it out for what it is.
#73
Fractional Reserve lending mate. If everyone who held money at your bank right now tried to pull all the money out of their accounts, the bank would close and none of you would get your money any time soon if at all. Fractional Reserve lending is nothing short of legal fraud.
#74
Tipping, when a friend who had never made more than minimum wage said tipping is mandatory at all restraints, like bro we in Canada they're at the minimum making more than u.
#75
Veterinary services. It’s emotional blackmail and you’re in a fully vulnerable position with an animal that can’t speak for itself but you want the best for, facing a company that is going to take as much money as it can. Someone needs to regulate and audit these places.
#76
Jewlery, my wife worked at a jewlwry store, one of the bigger retail ones, the markup on everything was about 400%. So even when they have a killer 50% off sale they are still making 200% profit.
#77
Hearing Aids. My wife needed Hearing Aids, older people kept on telling her go to Costco. If you go to an Audiologist they charge you for an appointment and bill your insurance then charge you over $3,000 an ear for hearing aids if you buy the cheap ones. Costco on the other hand does the hearing test for free helps you select them programs them to your needs and then will clean them for you replacing the filters, domes and wire when necessary every quarter all for under $2000 for both ears if you want to go with the expensive name brand ones. Insurance normally caps reimbursement at $3000 every 3 years. The first pair my wife bought she tried the Audiologist and she wanted to charge is $8300 for hearing aids. We said no went to Costco where my wife got the same test and same hearing aids for just under $1800. So one meant no money after reimbursement the other meant a $40 copay and $5300 out of pocket. The choice was easy. Now you can even buy some from other sources for about $900 but they lack any service.
#78
CPAP machines - they should be OTC just like hearing aids. Mine works great but getting it and dealing with medical distributors is an overpaid nightmare.
#79
A lot of the art world is designed around value inflation scams. Not all of it, but a good portion.
- Commission a fellow rich friend's kid to create a piece, or just buy a piece ~$2,000
- Have your friend appraise it for ~$25,000
- The artist sells other pieces to other rich friend's of their parents
- Because their sales show success, the piece you commissioned is now worth ~$100,000
- Use the falsely inflated market value of that painting as collateral to borrow money from the bank
- live off the borrowed money or use it to reinvest in property
- buying power of $100,000 for an investment of $2,000.
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