a woman came up to me on the street just now in berkeley to ask me for money and i was about evenly torn between whether she was scamming me or not. i'd like to hear what you guys think of the story, i'm really not sure
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she said she'd gotten robbed and needed $100 to pay for two nights at a hostel in SF before her EDD card came in the mail. she showed me a driver's license with the name roxanne barfield and invited me to look her up on fb under "roxy barfield"
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i did, she said the profile would be a picture of a phoenix and it was, i asked her to log in to confirm she controlled the account and she did. very few fb friends. would have been more convincing with a real profile pic
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relevant background here is that i've been scammed like this twice before in boston as a college student, one guy asked me for money for gas which i gather is a pretty common scam. so that's v much on my mind and i told her so
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i asked her why she didn't have anyone in her life she could borrow $100 from and she said she grew up a foster kid so no parents, sort of implied she didn't have friends, said she came to SF to try to get work at amazon
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she got teary-eyed at various points. after a little more back-and-forth i offered for her to walk with me and tell me more about herself while i got breakfast (if it's a scam this tests her cover story more and wastes her time)
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she paused to think (no tears) then said (tearily) that she needed enough time to get back to the hostel in SF or they might not let her keep her room. this is the point at which i decided not to help her and told her so
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it was 2:30 at the time and it takes maybe 2 hours worst case to get to a random place in SF from berkeley via BART etc, so i didn't entirely buy the time thing, she had enough thinking time to make that up
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i thought if she was genuine she'd be willing to take the time loss to have more time to convince me but if she was scamming me she'd want to give me as little time as possible to probe her cover story. but idk, who knows
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i told her that i couldn't help her, that i thought if this was real she'd come with me, and left. i walked away and i didn't hear a sound from her; no bursting into tears or anything
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i still don't know if this was the right call so poll: what do you guys think?
- obvious scam bro93.7%
- this was real u monster6.3%
414 votesFinal results
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worst case if it was real she sleeps on the streets for two days, obviously not fun but not a death sentence??? idk man idk :////////
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i *really* don't like not being able to tell if strangers are lying to me. if i 100% believed her it would have been no problem to just give her $100 straight out, i wouldn't even need to be paid back
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someone suggested googling the details, i don't have a totally exact match but "sob story scam" is a perfect fit for the general caetgory
google.com/search?q=sob+s
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asked a few people for thoughts and they brought up that apparently it's a common scam / lying thing to offer a bunch of "proof" / evidence unprompted; i wasn't paying much conscious attention to that but it is weird that she showed me her driver's license unprompted
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