When was the worst time you were financially swindled? And what happened?

7 comments

1. I put a down a deposit with a moving company that turned out to be a scam. They were using another legitimate company’s name/address on their website, so when I did my search for reviews and licensing, I saw all good things about a well-established company. They managed to scam quite a few people, some of whom they literally stole all of their furniture/belongings or refused to deliver without then paying triple the price originally quoted. After putting down my deposit, but before they arrived to pick up my stuff, I felt weird about some of the communications with them, so I rechecked the BBB page for the business and saw an alert posted a day before about a business impersonation scam being investigated. I cancelled with them immediately, but lost my deposit. Considering the issues that many other people had with them, I got off easy. I kept up with the story for a while and there were multiple fraud cases brought against them, but I don’t know how they ended up.

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3. I bought a kirby vacuum cleaner because they woke me up in the middle of the day after getting maybe 1.5 hours of sleep too many days in a row. I was exhausted and just wanted them to go away.

   Kirbys are terrible fucking vacuums. Don’t buy one. Even if you’re sleep deprived.

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5. My boyfriend (at the time) was starting a business. He kept hinting that he was about to propose but wanted to start this business, first. He had awful credit and asked if I could sign for his Line of Credit, which I agreed to do (since I figured we were about to get married anyway).

   Time went by. He never proposed. When I’d get upset about it, he would gaslight me and tell me I’d ruin the surprise if I kept pushing.

   Finally, after several years, I came to my senses and broke things off. I didn’t give another thought to him or his business…until I got a phone call from a creditor. It turns out, he’d spun that ONE Line of Credit into two loans and a credit card. In all, he’d borrowed over $100k in my name.

   I contacted 3 lawyers and all said it wasn’t fraud, since I’d signed the original paperwork.

   Needless to say, the battle had begun. It ended badly but it did end.

6. I had a dentist pray on my clearly very anxious and desperate state and talk me into spending a lot of money on treatment which was total bullshit.

   I thought in the UK dentists were held to a very high standard.

   Apparently you can’t even trust medical professionals, he was well qualified and reviews for him were good.

   Treatment ended up doing more harm than good, other specialists were like “Hell no, this is bullshit” and in the I lost A LOT of money trying to correct it.

7. It wasn’t a big scam or anything, but when I was 20, Barstool reached out to me asking if I wanted to be on their page. I said yes. They sent me some form to fill out and to give them $100 so I did. It was the verified Barstool page, it wasn’t a fake page. My picture never got posted and I realized it was a scam soon after.