List of scams
Victor Lustig, a con artist born in Austria-Hungary, designed and sold a "money box" which he claimed could print $100 bills using blank sheets of paper.
For example, the scammer may claim to have been arrested and require money wired, or gift cards purchased for bail, and asks the victim not to tell the grandchild's parents, as they would "only get upset".
The call is fraudulent impersonation, the name of the grandchild typically obtained from social media postings as well as obituaries listed either in newspapers or from a funeral home's website.
The scammer will aggressively push using the site instead of a more well-known service like Skype, Zoom, or Discord or using more rational ways to obtain age verification (such as asking to see a driver's license or passport).
In this scam, a fortune teller uses cold reading skills to detect that a client is genuinely troubled rather than merely seeking entertainment; or is a gambler complaining of bad luck.
Tricksters offer a non-ivory ornament for sale next to a sign in English reading "It is strictly forbidden to transport ivory into the United States, and the seller assumes no responsibility".
The con relies upon the truth that commercial lending and insurance, despite third-party appraisals and due diligence research, are based ultimately on trust between lender and borrower.
The function of the scam is simple -- the grifters generate phony documents that show the applicant borrower meets or exceeds capital liquidity requirements needed to qualify for multi-million-dollar financing or insurance.
Other tactics include placing phony items with tabloid gossip columns that note the frontman's lavish lifestyle and profligate spending, and ensuring company "stores" where marks are fleeced have expensive-seeming "fits and finishes" (in reality, cheap carpet, tile, paint, countertops, lighting fixtures, etc.).
The salesmen explain the ultra-low price in a number of ways; for instance, that their employer is unaware of having ordered too many speakers, so they are sneakily selling the excess behind the boss's back.
[citation needed] A "trade show" variation of a similar scam might involve a scammer pretending to have car troubles on the side of a highway, trying to hail passing vehicles.
[18] A mail fraud that is typically perpetrated on restaurateurs, this scheme takes a receipt from a legitimate dry cleaner in the target city, duplicates it thousands of times, and sends it to every upscale eatery in town.
An attached note claims a server in the victim's restaurant spilled food, coffee, wine or salad dressing on a diner's expensive suit of clothes, and demands reimbursement for dry cleaning costs.
Typically, clip joints suggest the possibility of sex, charge excessively high prices for watered-down drinks, then eject customers when they become unwilling or unable to spend more money.
[29] The underlying debt either does not exist, is not valid due to a statute of limitations or does not lawfully belong to the entity making the calls; in some cases, the victim is a target of identity theft.
[34] It also makes an effective fraudulent collection agency, as victims fear having to pay their own counsel hundreds of dollars per hour to defend against frivolous, vexatious or completely unfounded claims.
[38] When the project is never completed, investors seek their money back but find the supposed trust fund is empty, as both lawyer and real estate developer are fraudulent.
Several authors mention the scam: Daniel C. Dennett in Elbow Room (where he calls it the touting pyramid); David Hand in The Improbability Principle; and Jordan Ellenberg in How Not to Be Wrong.
[citation needed] The fiddle game may be played with any sufficiently valuable-seeming piece of property; a common variation known as the pedigreed-dog swindle uses a mongrel dog upsold as a rare breed but is otherwise identical.
The investigations using a fake lottery uncovered a large group of marks all targeted by a single artist, a disgruntled former employee of the Mint who used his insider knowledge and skills to produce the high-quality forged tickets.
A random dialer computer or auto-dialer can impersonate healthcare providers to get Social Security numbers and birthdates from elderly patients recently released from the hospital.
They are then required to give their credit card details in order to purchase some form of support, after which they are asked to allow remote connection to the "error-laden" computer so that the problem(s) may be fixed.
In one recent nationwide religious scam, churchgoers are said to have lost more than $50 million in a phony gold bullion scheme, promoted on daily telephone prayer chains, in which they thought they could earn a huge return.
Postal Service Domestic Mail Manual §CO31, Part 1.2) The disclaimers are otherwise designed to appear to be invoices or renewals of existing display advertising in a trade directory or publication.
The correspondence is formatted like an invoice, often with a sequential identification number, date, personalized description of the information to be published, payment details and total amount due, which includes a token discount if paid within a specified time period.
The "registration" actually offers nothing beyond a vague claim that the entity sending the solicitation will submit the victim's domain name to existing search engines for an inflated fee.
Eventually, the pattern terminates by ending the "auction" without reaching the high-value items, and stopping midway through a phase where the trickster retains the collected money from that round of purchases.
"[79] It is standard practice for mystery shopping providers evaluating services such as airlines to arrange for the airfare to be issued beforehand at their own expenses (usually by means of a frequent flyer reward ticket).
In a typical variation scammers will target, say, a jeweler, and offer to buy some substantial amount of his wares at a large markup provided he perform some type of under-the-table cash deal, originally exchanging Swiss francs for euros.
[101] A common scam targeting businesses is the toner bandit swindle; an unsolicited caller attempts to trick front-office personnel into providing manufacturer/model or serial numbers for office equipment and/or the name of the employee answering the call.
