There are a lot of scammers out there and some of the scammers have definitely gotten incredibly sophisticated and it can be hard to determine what is real and what is a scam. These scammers increasingly take advantage of people who are older or perhaps less knowledgable about how the internet works, but there are also scams out there that are incredibly obvious that I hope no one falls for. Here are three funniest scams that are too obvious to fall for.
Celebrity Scam Requests
One of the funniest scams I’ve seen out there is people posing as celebrities claiming to need money from you. People, celebrities have their own money. They don’t need money from you. This scam claiming to be Lady Gaga is one of the funniest scams that is too obvious to fall for.
Incredibly Attractive People
Did you suddenly, out of the blue, get contacted by a very attractive person who just suddenly found you online and wants to get to know you and finds you attractive and perfect for them? Obviously a scam. Unfortunately, people do fall for these, but it can be very funny to suddenly find a model reaching out to you to chat and, of course, who needs you to send them some money. No matter how attractive someone is, don’t send them money if you’ve never met in person.
Ridiculous URLs
Sometimes, the scammers just make it too obvious. This scammer sent a link for someone to click that would likely have sent them to a dangerous link making it easy for them to have their information stolen, but in the text of the link, they literally used the word “scam.” Never click any links that you don’t recognize, but certainly don’t click unknown links with the word scam in them!
Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
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