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
Conversation
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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the real answer is there's no way to know for sure and it's a tradeoff — do you care more about avoiding scams or avoiding missed opportunities to legit help? can't maximize one benefit without incurring the other penalty
fwiw, I would have immediately rebuffed, no convo
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if you want to help people w/ your spare resources w/o this epistemic issue, better to identify a needy target yourself versus wait for approach
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Replying to
both of these replies were helpful to read, thx sonya 🙏
(fwiw she only got me talking to her b/c i thought she was gonna ask for directions)
Replying to
my pleasure! hope I wasn't articulating the obvious too much. hard to tell sometimes when that's useful versus condescending
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you hit the mark here don't worry, i'm not exactly bursting with "common sense" or "street smarts" generally 😅
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