38 Everyday Scams That People Really Don't Notice
This stuff is so normalized, and that's exactly how they get you.
Published 4 years ago in Wow
Knowledge is power and being well-informed about some of the shady industry practices that go on behind closed doors can help keep you from being among the thousands of suckers born every minute.
9
Unpaid internships. F*ck anyone who gives unpaid internships! People get exploited like sh*t in that and for what? Most times they don't even count. For what purpose? I get so irritated when someone posts "unpaid but you'll be given a certificate". Shut the f*ck up and do the work by yourself you lazy ass.
12
The diamond industry, specifically as it relates to jewelry. Everything that the average person "knows" about it stems from propaganda and advertisements created by DeBeers. They aren't rare, they aren't worth what you pay for them, they don't appreciate in value and are a terrible investment. They aren't special.
18
Cat food. Look at the cat food at a random store, and see how the design brags about all the healthy vegetables they've crammed into your obligate carnivore's diet. Then check out the ingredients and see how corn, rice, etc. are often the first ingredients. Pet foods market toward humans by trying to appeal to human sensibilities, not genuine desire to provide your cat with the best diet.
23
Social media. From their happy beginnings they are now mostly a funnel used to ram as many advertisements into your mind as inhumanly possible. “Sponsored Posts” every third or fourth item - I see you, IG/FB/Red/etc. And that’s not even mentioning the extensive filtering network that “curates” the information you get to see when you are looking for something. “Curated information” is just a nice expression for you being conditioned to form certain opinions / buy more stuff. Social media groom minds
24
Paying for cable tv. The whole idea of paying was to create a revenue stream separate from that of marketing. There are a few out there (HBO, I think) but generally we pay to access the content and still have to spend 20% of the time sitting through commercials. Then streaming comes in and were free of advertisements again, for a bit. Now YouTube has tons of ads and other streaming services are talking about adding ads as well
25
Starbucks. I pay $9.99 for 51 oz of Folgers Ground Coffee, roughly 380 8 oz cups. That comes out to about $0.02 per cup of coffee. At Starbucks, a Tall Dark Roast costs $1.85. I could have 92.5 cups of Folgers at home before I pay for 1 Starbucks. My tub of Folgers is worth $703.00 if I were to sell it at the same price as Starbucks. AND I’m using reusable cups every day.
26
Idk if anyone remembers Power Balance bracelets from the early 2000s. A lot of celebrities and athletes advertised for them and they claimed to improve your balance and overall health. Well being a rubber bracelet made in a factory, it was all nonsense but they still sold millions of units before shutting down. A new company owns them now and you can still buy them though
32
Annual college tuition increases. Why aren’t they held to a competitive pricing model as opposed to having to take out a mortgage to go to school? Everyone wants to talk about government paying for college education, but there is no conversation on why is it that expensive anyway? Especially when some unis have endowments in the billions that just the interest on those funds could literally pay the tuition for everyone that goes through the door.
37
Back to base security system monitoring Huge scam. My smart home security system alerts me faster than ADT ever did (biggest offenders) When you don’t answer the call, they will send out someone and will charge you a fee And every-time your system messes up, it will send false error codes to the monitoring station, which they will charge you a huge fee to fix And oh if you want to disconnect it, they guy i spoke to from ADT was going to charge me $250 call out + $50 for every 15 minutes he was at my house, and the job would of taken at least an hour he they said, they may need to go into the roof no i just called a security installation Electrictian and he said $50 call out and $30 for every 30 minutes he was there but that was depending on the type of job He was at my house for 5 minutes Power off Remove power wires from control box* Protect the wires so its safe Replace cover on control box Done He only charged $50. Compared to ADTs service which would of cost about $450
38
The Verizon $1 scam. Verizon tacked on a $1 fee onto 8% of their customer's bills each month so over the course of the year, they did it to every customer, about 150,000,000. Their rationale was: 50% wouldn't notice and just pay the charge or would notice and wouldn't spend anytime fighting a $1 charge. 50% would notice the charge and call to have it removed. Of those, 35% would get frustrated while on the call and give up. This added approximately $120,000,000 to the bottom line each year (3 total) until caught. Once caught, they paid a $25,000,000 fine.
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