Couple years ago I won a scholarship to a college in Germany, for the carreer I had always wanted to work in but couldn’t practice it, as it just doesn’t exist in local colleges. I was born and bred in the third world, and still live here; I thought my luck was finally turning around. I’d be able to maybe have a better future, doing what I really wanted instead of just what I was good at.
One night as I was overthinking ish, I decided to look for everything relevant about the college. It was a scam college. No certifications, and the owners had recently been in hot waters due to money laundering. I had everything ready to hop on a plane.
I’ve never fallen for bad scams luckily but I fall for little ones sometimes. Like once I was entering the subway in a country where I didn’t speak the language and this guy coming the other way said the trains were cancelled, so I asked how do I get to X place, and he’s like “Oh, my friend has a taxi company, come with me and I’ll sort you out”. I was just about to follow him when I came back to my senses. Obviously there was nothing wrong with the trains and he was trying to fleece a tourist… or kidnap a woman, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
I sold cutco knives for a month.
If you’re looking for a job, stay the fuck away from anything dealing with “CutCo” or “Vector Marketing.”
Edit: Its not really a pyramid scheme… They just do everything they can to weasel out of giving you your paycheck on payday and because it’s sales commission, I don’t think they have to follow minimum wage laws since you’re not paid hourly.
Unless they’ve seriously changed how it fundamentally works (this was when I was 18). They never encouraged or paid extra for getting others to sell for you, like a typical MLM thing.
Fun fact: MLMs cannot be made illegal because they’re a quintessential expression of pure capitalism.
What about making your country not pure capitalism
Literally communism.
So what is actually the deal with CutCo? I know they’re a scam, everyone knows they’re a scam, but this one particular woman I know to be in general not a dummy, says her son spent the summer selling their knives once and made good money.
Was he just lying to her? How does the scam work?
MLMs can be actually viable jobs for a very select few of people. Not entirely unlike how you can theoretically make money at a casino. There need to be winners to the game once in a while, or else no one would play. The game is just rigged wildly out of your favor.
The general structure of an MLM as I understand it is sort of a cross between a wholesale job and playing a mobile gacha game. Unlike a normal business where you purchase stock to match your demand, and only stock items that actually sell, an MLM contractually obligates you to buy a certain volume of stock, and each shipment is essentially a lootbox full of who knows what. It then becomes your responsibility to get rid of the stock any way you possibly can.
When you buy all that stock, you are not buying it from a factory or a warehouse. You are buying it from another person in the same position as you, one layer up. They are also playing the lootbox gacha and trying to get rid of all the crap. Except, hmm, now they have at least one person beneath them who is contractually forced to buy from them, and can’t select which stock they’re buying. Gee, I wonder what you’re gonna be getting…
Whenever you actually do manage to sell something off, a cut of that kicks back to the person who sold you that stock. And a piece of that kickback goes to the person who sold them that stock, and so on, up and up.
The real money in MLMs is having so many people beneath you that the kickbacks start adding up into significant income. This is theoretically achievable. But it requires a very specific kind of personality matrix who is not squeamish about being a little cut-throat to get ahead, and generally requires a significant investment where you are going deep into the red just for the opportunity. And even if you do make it there, you have to accept the knowledge that your profitability can only exist necessarily because of the existence of many people beneath you all spinning those slots and losing the rigged game to the house (who by this point is you).
Okay, so, it’s not technically a scam. It’s an MLM. The salesman has to buy the stuff they want to sell up-front, and then they have to try and sell it to people. If no one wants to buy, then they’re stuck with a whole bunch of whatever–knives in the case of CutCo/Vector–and out the money that they spent. If they happen to be an exceptionally good salesperson, then they can sell everything they purchased, and use their profit to buy more, and sell more, etc.
The issue is that the knives aren’t particularly great. They’re solidly ‘okay’, and that’s about it. But despite being just kind of okay, the prices are on the higher end. That is, you can get Global or Shun for a similar price, and Global and Shun are both quite good. So if you’re a serious cook, your going to spend the same and get better knives. If you’re a typical home cook, you’re not going to see the value in spending that much on kitchen knives.
But! The real money is in convincing some poor sucker to buy his stock to sell from you. You buy from your supplier, and then you sell at a markup to some other poor schmuck that then has to sell knives at either a higher cost or lower profit margin to someone else. It’s a game of hot potato, and the person holding it at the end gets burned.
Like all these multi-level-marketing scams, the scam part is that you have to buy your stock from the company/from your “upline”, and then whether or not you make money depends on you reselling your stock.
John Oliver did an excellent video on the overall topic. Definitely worth the watch.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Or any other kind of pyramid scheme, really
The knives are decent; if the only way to get a new one wasn’t through an MLM I might actually buy them.
It’s not an MLM or pyramid scheme; it is regular sales employment. You’re not getting other people to sell them for you nor are you encouraged to find others looking to join the sales team. It just sucks dick because the pay is shit (and they go through hoops to pay you less or nothing; which is where the scam part comes in), they treat you like shit, and you have to basically sell them door-to-door.
It’s stupid because the knives are great products; I still have my sample set because they actually rock. They just only sell them like Tupperware clubs and only market them via word of mouth. They’d be making bank if they just sold them to retailers instead of fucking with young people looking for their first job.
Oh ok, good to know! They’re always lumped in with MLMs so I always thought they were one. I appreciate the correction, even if they still have a predatory business model—just a different one than MLMs.
When I was switching careers I looked into one of the IT schools. They looked nice and promised me a decent job with decent pay. In exchange, I’d need to pay a percentage of my future salary. I said ok, and signed the papers.
Little did I know they offered a course that was available for free and “exams” that were conducted by students that have finished one chapter more. Saw a lot of bullying and left this mess before finishing it without paying a dime.
Got a job that actually lied in between the career I pursued previously and the career that was offered by this “school”. In some sense they’ve helped me, and to this day I’m ashamed that I haven’t paid them anything.
I also took an airport taxi that costed me ten times a usual cost.
One time when I was in middle school I started playing RuneScape, and there was this helpful guy hanging out in the starting area. He told me he could get me better gear if I followed him. He took me to the wilderness and killed me and stole all my stuff. I didn’t really know anything about the game so I thought that without my precious starting gear I would be lost, so I started a new account.
And then once I had played a lot and understood the game better, I made a bunch of sets of steel armor and food and I hung out in the starting area and gave it out for free to new players. Because fuck that guy. I decided I would take his evil and turn it into kindness.
I honestly don’t know what he had to gain, the starting gear is worthless. Maybe he just liked fucking people over.
I remember having the same thing happen to me in RS
Got duped into giving my login info to a dude who promised to put money into my bank. Lost my account for like a week, and when I finally recovered it, they had taken what little I had. I cried.
Runescape as a child was a good place to learn life lessons
Hahahaha I also just posted a story about being a kid on RuneScape!
Mine was about a guy who told me he could get me good gear and walked me out to the wilderness and killed me.
Ouch. My heart goes out to you.
2 minutes to realize I couldn’t log in because someone else was logged in as me wasn’t an error. 3 minutes to realize and verify the login page was a clone. An eternity to change my password immediately. The bot had already handed off 1.6B in gold, my many many feathers, lobsters, swordfish, and ores. Probably my armors too. Never even left the Grand Exchange. I raged and then I cried. Haven’t played it since.
Sad memories, but good lessons for adults too.
Been there lol
Purchasing my first home, apparently all info regarding the sale is public information. Companies scrape or buy this data and then spam your mailbox with various extra services. In my case, it was mortgage premium insurance or something like that. Anyways, the letter I received in the mail went something like this: “You forgot something important regarding your home purchase”. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like that.
I’m a first time home buyer and I am trying to stay on top of things. Of course, because they are able to get all the information regarding the sale. It looks legit, they have my name, address, loan number, loan amount, the bank serving the loan and everything. I call to make sure everything is alright and fortunately they didn’t answer. I took the extra time to look up what mortgage premium insurance even was and that is how I came across the fact that it may be a scam.
Anyways, they call me back eventually and by this time I am on to them. I ask some questions regarding their company and the entire time they keep repeating the name of the bank that is serving my loan, but refuse to give me the name of their company. After a bit more back and forth they finally let it slip that they are from some unrelated insurance company to which I decline their offer. I wanted to curse them out, but I just wasn’t raised that way.
Edit: A lot of people don’t take online privacy seriously. Usually going whats the harm. I was never really comfortable with it to the point of apathy, but I was a bit lax at times. This experience made me find out first hand what the harm of everyone having access to your data is.
Girlfriend will quit cigarettes for you.
It took me a while, but you’re saying the girlfriend said she’d quit smoking for you, and the scam was that she lied?
Pretty much.
I see this is an unpopular comment but that happens.
My girlfriend was a smoker when I met her. She stopped for a time, but took it up again when visiting family.
She won’t stop for me, but says she will try again on the date of her father’s death.
She has four brain aneurysm but still smokes away.
On the plus side it keeps me busy and creative maintaining a system of smart switches, thermostats, motion detectors etc to run positive ventilation or vacuum when she enters the house or the smoking room.
It’s just hard knowing that even though you’re married, you take second place to a dead father and a pack of cig’s.
I once had one of those crypto-people message me with a sales pitch, asking for money to help start their small business in Africa or something like that (can’t remember what, I think it was a micro-brewery)
As an actual business owner, their initial ideas sounded okay, and I began forwarding them resources on how to secure a low-interest loan from their government and grants and stuff like that and then they abruptly closed up with:
“This is scam, brother. This is scam. You have good heart. I tell you only once, do not message this number.”
We forget that on the other end of scams are real people with real problems, morals, and lives. The person on the other end of your scam probably started to feel bad and helped you out. And likely that person is being forced into performing these scams on people.
There’s an excellent “Search Engine” podcast episode about this that came out recently called “Who’s behind these scammy text messages we’ve all been getting.” It’s well worth a listen because it dives into all the slavery and human trafficking involved in modern scams that people aren’t aware of.
Can you link the podcast?
Not the one you asked for, but another interesting episode on the topic: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/141/
That’s the website, but it’s not rendering for me for some reason.
Here’s a PocketCast link:
Look up “pig butchering” by John Oliver. Yes, this is the technical term for it.
The podcast goes much more in depth than Oliver did. But they’re both good content.
The especially vile thing about these scam centers is that often they trick normal people just trying to find work and support their family. They steal their passport and then hold them hostage with slave labour.
Aww.
Europe is the saviour of the world after USA falls. Yes, that is a scam liberals and West bootlickers sell you.
Also, incel/redpill movement. I came dangerously close to it as a teenager, but always maintained distance since. I chuckle when someone tells me I am not on the left because I support men’s rights.
Not really fallen for, but at some point you don’t really have a choice. So in Bali near the waterfalls you sometimes have these people who claim to work for some official company asking for the entrance fee, but of course they don’t. But are you gonna just say no and keep on driving to save like 2,50 bucks when 2 burly guys are telling you to stop?
Seems like happens in almost everywhere in 2nd & 3rd world countries. :(
My RuneScape account got rinsed because of my teenage stupidity in the early 2000’s, learned a very valuable lesson and haven’t been scammed since.
That’s why I’m glad lemmy censors your password if you write it in a comment, For instance: /*******
All I see is
hunter2
I got lured for my bandos armor back in the day, I stopped playing for a couple of years after that one
Nice idea, scammers! Weeding out what works and doesn’t with this feedback! But it won’t work on meeeeeee
In the early 2000s, I bought a book for someone from amazon.com. I’d had good experiences with Amazon a few years earlier in the late 90s when it worked like a normal store - you pay Amazon and they send you the book you ordered. Little did I know that Amazon had since become a ‘marketplace’ where they let any old scammer list, take your money, and not send anything. After a couple of months with no book arriving, luckily I was able to charge back and get the money back from the bank.
