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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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
Replying to
Did she speak real fast? That’s always my filter for whether they’re trying to get inside my loop
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ish? not in a way that stood out to me
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I once had someone in Oakland try to scam me like this and I said I didn't have any cash and they followed me and then they saw I had some cash when I took out my wallet to get my Bart card, and then they dropped their act, got mad, and called *me* a liar. 🙄
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They got me, I did in fact have like 4 dollars. My metahonesty permits me to lie to people trying to scam me, I'm not ashamed to say it.
But yeah, trying too hard to give evidence was what tipped me off.
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Replying to
Sounds scammy to me. I offered to buy lunch for a guy who said he hadn’t eaten in 3 days. He wanted me to walk to a BBQ place across town instead of one of the many restaurants nearby. Offered to buy another person a bus ticket - they got mad & instisted I give them cash.
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Having been burned this way - lots of people have *really* convincing stories because they're reusing a real story of when they needed money fast for a good reason. Very hard to know until you see them use the same story the next day, or after getting the cash.
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Which doesn't actually answer your question, but gives one pointer - verifying info other than e.g. a dated receipt or letter doesn't mean very much. Something like asking for the exact price of a specific Greyhound ticket just means it could have been true.
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This entire thread is so disgusting, I really hope no one asks you for help again. Jeez
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I hope someday he needs to ask for help, and nobody thinks he “deserves” it.
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