Scamcasts

[minx]

I've started listening to podcasts - most of them are about scammers, and I mean big time scammers - not your average Nigerian Princes!

The last one I listened to (Believable - the Coco Berthman story) centered around a woman who claimed that her mother sex trafficked her from infancy.
Despite the many holes in her story, she was embraced by tons of people who felt sorry for her and wanted to help her.
Among the lies - she was raped up to 50 times a day as a young child while her mother watched.
She became pregnant and her step-father took her to a place where her child was ripped from her body (via a crude c-section) without anesthesia
She escaped from the home, got psychiatric care.  Her therapist invited her to live with him where (you guessed it), she was raped again and again.
So many lies upon lies, yet people kept on taking her in, giving her money and believing her story.  And of course she was a darling of the alt-right, as she fed completely into their narrative of pretty young white girls being sold into sex slavery.
In the end, she was caught because she claimed to have cancer and started a gofundme.  Of course she was lying yet again, but this time she was arrested for fraud.
Got a slap on the wrist - had to repay the $10 grand she stole and had the crime wiped off her record.
Did I mention she was German, and didn't have a work visa and was no longer attending school FT, so violating her student visa as well.  But she's still in the US and no one can find out why.

It's really amazing to see the shit that people do and get away with.
She did a great job of completely cutting ties with people once she had no use for them, and she was vague enough with the next victim that they didn't have a way to really check things.  And they all said that at first it all sounded super real.  It wasn't until they really got to know her that they realized that shit wasn't adding up.

[Dave's Not Here Man]

Similar in tactics to the Tawana Brawley story, which started off as a means in which one person and his cause would have the camera's attention and thereby, people's ear. One reason I don't do one of the networks that employs him. My point here is that we all need a bottom and to know where it is otherwise we are no better than the person manipulating us

[minx]

I think Tawana's story was on the short-side of scams.

These people do this shit over DECADES and get away with it! And when you hear the victims, all of them are pretty intelligent people who fell for a con artist.
I did feel sorry for them. And these folks are super good at knowing when to move on.

[Dave's Not Here Man]

Rule number one now is don't trust anybody until you can verify. I have noticed a hundred new youtube channels and other "content creaters" on social media, which would obviously include podcasts et al, and they all have pretty much one thing in common- feeding you bullshit.

We also have these folks that come directly to the door to pull their scams. Last guy implied he was with REC and following up to make sure we were satisfied with the new meters they put in a while back. Yep. Well sir, we're following up to see if you might be interested in participating in a program we're offering........... okay thanks I'm not interested but have a nice day. Tree guys at least twice a week rolling around in pickup trucks pulling teh beds of other pickup trucks as trailers, Hey you need some of these trees taken down I'll give you a hell of a price?!? No.

Had one guy that came out last year to quote me on grinding two stumps left by the trees the kids dropped and hauled out. I was like okay let's do it but first I need to have a copy of your insurance. Ghosted. Looked him up on DPOR and there wasn't even any licensing info. Highly recommended by a couple people on a chat board, mind you. My request stated LICENSED AND INSURED only.

[minx]

Yeah - I avoid chat board recommendations for that reason.

But these guys take scamming to a whole new level. The chick in the one I was referring to learned all of the stuff that many survivors do - keep the story hidden and reveal it bit-by-bit, play on someone's sympathy and make your actions and words put others in a position of forcing them to give you the benefit of the doubt. And she also would befriend actual survivors and incorporate their stories into her own to make hers more believable. It was super planned out and very, very slick. And since she was one sole person and not saying she was with a company she got away with it.

[Dave's Not Here Man]

I believe it was P.T. Barnum that coined the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute".