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)
Conversation
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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was she kind of middle eastern looking?
im only asking because there are many gypsies in the Bay Area who make a living out of scamming people and making up stories asking them for money and I've been a victim of them before
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I would suggest trusting your intuition and doing what feels most natural to you without guilt. also you could look into resources for the local homeless population to point people to - there are quite a lot of good ones in the bay
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Replying to
no, white or at least white-passing