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23 December 2007

"Dude, I've been hit. I'm bleeding. I need a helicopter out of here . . . " In an urgent call to a friend, Larry Lee Risser Jr. said he had been wounded in an ambush during a clandestine CIA assignment and he needed $10,000 for a rescue helicopter.
The gullibility of people never ceases to amaze me. Every time I deal with a case at work where someone's signed up for a non-existent holiday club, or agreed to accept a cheque far in excess of the price they're asking for an eBay item and pay the difference to the purchaser, I wonder how people still fall for these things.
posted by essexjan 24 December | 04:41
I fell for a scam when I was 19. I befriended a guy in San Francisco. He was supposedly a volunteer at an AIDS charity and worked for a tattoo shop. I went back home to the Midwest, and he called me a month later saying he'd lost his job and was about to be evicted from his apartment. He said his family had abandoned him after he'd come out, so they wouldn't help him, and his boyfriend had left him after he (my friend) had tested HIV+. He asked me to wire him several hundred dollars for rent; he was expecting a check from the AIDS charity and would pay me back as soon as that arrived. I was torn - I didn't know this guy that well, and $300 was a LOT of money to me then. But IMO it was better to take the chance than for him to be living on the street, especially being HIV+ (this was before most of the "good" drugs came out).

Obviously, I never heard from him again. The AIDS charity had never heard of him, and the tattoo shop said they'd fired him for having a drug problem. I'm sure my money went up his arm or nose, but I don't regret it. Since when is money worth more than friendship?
posted by desjardins 24 December | 09:59
Walk Hard, the Dewey Cox Story || Beard 2.0

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