re: Which of these scams did your parents/grandparents fall for?

That is some amazingly crazy stuff Dawg. (Irish Travelers).

There have been a few that roam in a van in the neighborhood once or twice a summer. If you leave your garage open, they pop in and grab what they can and take off. When confronted, they are almost always looking for their lost dog and saw it run in your garage.

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Avon. I assumed the Avon lady was my mom's best friend but only saw her when she was bringing my mom soap and makeup. I did get some really cool soap shaped like snowmobiles one time.

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I still knock on my grandmas door and enter saying “Avon”. Her sisters would come over and their local Avon lady would stop by to sell them shite all the time. It seems ridiculous now that people did that shite.

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This was actually quality stuff that lasts a lifetime. Still have some that is close to 40 years old.

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My mom, at about 75, called University of Phoenix once about finishing her degree (she had never started one). They directed her to a website where she took an "entrance" exam and provided some minor personal information and her SS#. Never thought about it again. About 3 months they start calling her telling her she owes them $3000. Scares her to death. They continue calling. in 9 months she owed them right at $12000. A little under $10K of that was student loans they had gotten on her behalf. She called me finally and told me she was scared...I did not know anything about it at the time. Said they were threatening to come to her apartment and take all her stuff, her car, and even calling her neighbors telling them that she wouldn't pay her bills. I was more than pissed. I flew home the next week and started calling them. Finally had to get our state representative at the time involved. They finally quit calling when they found out her only income was SS and it can't be garnisheed and she owned nothing but a car worth about $3k.


The truly bad part is they actually received right at $10K from the taxpayers. They did the application for her and ramrodded it through the system without her knowledge. Even if she did have knowledge she had already been diagnosed with dementia. She was not competent to make any financial decisions...and of course they prey on older people because they are easy to intimidate.

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I think every camp on LSJ or LB has a Cutco knife in the drawer. That's where they all seem to go.

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now that you mention it, ours are at the camp last I recall.

Funny we had this discussion last week. Mom and dad had some furniture when I was little from Nana's house. It was put in the basement when I was a boy and they bought new furniture. It turned up at the camp a few years later, I stole some for my first place, and by now it's long gone from my place except for a few dishes that belonged to my wife (no pics) grandmother.

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Columbia House

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My cousin lives in a trailer park that had all the mailboxes at the road. He would put random names and the addresses of people in the trailer park to get the cassettes. He did it during the summer one year so he could be around when the mail passes. There were 20-30 trailers in the park and he used pretty much every address but his.

My brother found out about that but we didn't live in a trailer park so he just used our address. My mom found out and made him use his own money to pay the rest so it wouldn't "ruin his credit" at 15 years old lol.

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renting" an answering machine from ATT for like 20 years.

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You could say the same thing about any isy today who leases a modem and router from their ISP. Buying your own is much cheaper.

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CAD703X

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Comparing Amway, a 9 billion dollar company, to those other shitty businesses is like comparing a Bentley to a Chrysler

Also scams are illegal, what you listed are legal businesses. Don’t be dumb.

My mother bought several ounces of gold thanks to the commercials on Fox news. I mean it wasn't a scam and it hasn't lost any value, in fact it's gone up a little bit. But it always irked me that they used fear as their selling point.

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That is some amazingly crazy stuff Dawg. (Irish Travelers).

There have been a few that roam in a van in the neighborhood once or twice a summer. If you leave your garage open, they pop in and grab what they can and take off. When confronted, they are almost always looking for their lost dog and saw it run in your garage.

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When we lived in New Mexico this was an epidemic 2 summers in a row. Almost everyone in our town had a good sized shop on their place full of ATVs and tractors and tools...stuff that is easy to run off with if one is so bent. Everyone was convinced it was meth heads doing it but there were also travelers operating in the area every summer....methheads steal stuff that can be sold within minutes for just a few dollars...they ain't stealing a 40 HP backhoe and trying to sell it.