Too often do we see the schemers, fraudsters, and scoundrels in life get off scot-free. But every once in a while justice is served and it is recorded in all of its karmic glory. For example, check out these stories of folks who out-scammed their scammers. With a little bit of tenacity, you can get even!
JB Calls Out Some BS
“This is the story of how a friend of mine nuked a timeshare scam a few years back and took them to the cleaners.
Background: friend of mine is a big dude, maybe 6’3′ and 250lbs, and a no-nonsense military NCO. Likes his booze and likes to have a good time when he’s off the clock. We’ll call him JB. One day he got one of those ‘win a free week-long cruise, all expenses paid’ phone calls. He decides to look into it because why the hell not? Calls the number back and gets a lady on the other end who gives him the rundown of how the cruise thing works. It sounds too good to be true, so he asks her ‘Is there some sort of timeshare BS or other strings attached to this?’ She assures him that no, there is not. He goes for it and signs up for a cruise a few months later during a block of leave.
Revenge: In order to claim the cruise, he and his wife had to show up a day early at a hotel near the port where the cruise was departing. The room is paid for already as a part of the cruise package. They show up the day before and check in with the front desk. The concierge asks if they’d like to upgrade to the VIP package for $20, which includes free drinks at the hotel bar. Heck yes, he takes the upgrade and heads to the bar. JB is a social drinker, and when he gets liquored up he starts socializing with the other bar patrons.
He finds out that they are also there for the cruise, and that there is a mandatory ‘presentation’ the next morning that everyone has to go to. JB starts to smell a rat, this sounds an awful lot like a timeshare scam. Well, he’s having none of it, and being good and drunk he rallies all the cruise-goers around him (about 30 people), gets up on a table, and delivers a William Wallace-style speech about how they don’t have to deal with these timeshare scam artists. Within minutes he’s whipped the crowd into a frenzy and convinced everyone not to buy into whatever the presentation is selling.
Sure enough, the next morning everyone shows up to the presentation to claim their cruise. They are told the tickets will be given to them at the conclusion of the presentation. JB is drunk again because, well, free booze and he’s on leave. JB starts to go back into Braveheart mode, getting really loud about how it’s a scam and he was told explicitly that there is no timeshare nonsense attached to this cruise. Well, the timeshare people instantly recognize JB is bad for business so they usher him away from everyone else into a side room and try to talk sense into him. TS = Time Share scammer:
TS: ‘Sir, this is a mandatory presentation. We cannot give you a ticket for the cruise unless you go to this.’
JB: ‘BS! Y’all specifically said there was no timeshare involved in this cruise!’
TS: ‘Sir we have all our calls recorded, and it was very clearly outlined that you’d need to listen to this presentation.’
JB: ‘Good! Let’s pull up my recording and you show me when they said that!’
At this point, a big beefy security-looking dude (not with the hotel, clearly a part of the timeshare company) tries to intervene because JB is getting louder and angrier. S = security:
S: (putting a hand on JB’s shoulder) ‘Sir we’re gonna have to…
JB: ‘BACK UP PRICK, I WILL RIP OFF YOUR HEAD, CRAWL DOWN YOUR NECK, AND OUT THE OTHER END!’ (He sure has a way with words)
S: (meekly turns tail and runs)
At this point it is clear that they can’t let JB into the presentation or else he’ll ruin everything, so the director of the program pulls JB into his office. Basically tells JB that they listened to his call and he’s right, the lady had said there was no timeshare involved. The director admits that they aren’t able to print his ticket until 12:30pm (the time the presentation was scheduled to end) because the company locks them in order to force people to go to the presentations. He says ‘Come back at 12:30, I’ll have your tix and I will upgrade you to premium for free if you just don’t go anywhere near our presentation’. Too easy, JB does exactly that and then heads to the boat. The premium was like the best cabin on the boat with (again) free booze and all sorts of awesome upgrades, including $5,000 on his account.”
Turns out, everyone else who had to sit through the timeshare presentation almost missed the boat because it went so long. Not a SINGLE PERSON bought a timeshare, and the presenters spent hours trying to convince them to. Eventually, they gave up and handed everyone their tickets in defeat. In total, they made $0 in sales and lost another $5,000 to JB’s free premium upgrade.
Jack The Jack Off
“About 10 years ago my landlord died. Or at least the person who owned the place we were renting. The property managers had been delightful, but whoever inherited wanted to sell, so the house was for sale.
Enter a jack off–we’ll call him Jack–who decides to buy the place. Now ours was the top floor (ie: attic converted into a suite) of a house, less than 35 square meters (375 square feet). The bathroom was literally where the stairs up to the top floor used to be. The place was tiny.
Jack came to check out the place, as you should before buying a place. He had one of those blue-tooth earpieces in and I can’t even remember if he even acknowledged us. He spent about 30-45 seconds in our suite.
The next time we heard from him is about a month later, apparently, he’d bought the place. He stops by to give us a notice of rent increase, effective in 6 months (the legal minimum). From $485 to $795. The place is not worth that much.
We say nuts to that and decide to buy a house since it’s not much more per month (surprise to anyone who’s never bought a house: it was more than just mortgage payments). We give him all the required notice to move out. We moved and cleaned the place up really well. Mind you, when my partner moved in it was not especially clean (and we happened to have the move-in inspection which mentions this).
Jack decides to try to scam us for $80 of our damage deposit for ‘cleaning.’ He doesn’t provide the required forms, just says, I’m going to hold $80 from your damage deposit for cleaning.
We respond with: ‘Um, no. You’re not.’
Jack (assuming we need the cash for our next damage deposit or bills and will settle for anything): Take this or I’m going to keep your whole deposit.
Cue Revenge:
So he decides to just keep the whole deposit ($485).
I file paperwork with the rental manager who unsurprisingly, after their investigation, rule in my favor. He’s ordered to refund the whole deposit. But Jack decides, not to pay. And the rental manager doesn’t have any enforcement powers.
So I had to take it up with the local sheriff’s office. They send a legal demand letter for the deposit and costs. But it will cost me $100-150 upfront. Sure go ahead.
Jack decides to ignore the sheriff’s kind letter.
Sheriffs say that they can start proceedings to recover the debt and costs, but I again have to pay up-front about $250, and it might take quite a while.
I guess most people quit at this point. Being out of pocket ~$700, throwing more money at the problem, and maybe having to wait months didn’t appeal to them. And there’s also a chance you never collect.
I chose to pay the sheriffs. They sent another, less friendly letter to Jack. But here’s the best part: now that they’re recovering a debt, they’re going to recover on ALL of the outstanding judgments against him. And apparently, he has tried this nonsense before.
They send him another couple of letters: pay up or else.
Jack chose else.
Then they seize the title to Jack’s giant white SUV. They didn’t physically take it away or anything, but they gave him 30 days to pay all the judgments against him or they would take it and sell it at auction.
Somehow he all of a sudden found the money. My share: $485 + $150 + $250 = $885. The other people who’d registered judgments, but not paid to start the collections processes were about $5,000 more. I can’t remember how long the whole process took, at least 6 months though but it was well worth it seeing him pay through the nose.”
Fishing For Compliments
“So about a month ago I applied for a sushi restaurant called Yoshi’s and I got a text from their ‘hiring manager,’ and we chatted about my availability, location, start date, yada yada.
She then asked me to write a ‘review’ of general Japanese food to show I knew what I was talking about and could upsell customers. Fine, I write a long review and sent it to her.
She then sends me a tinylink URL and told me to post it there before I would be invited for an interview. I click it and what do you know? It’s the Google page for a whole different restaurant all the way across the city. So I read the reviews, and they had done this to 30 or so people in the last two weeks at the different locations franchised to the same crazy owner.
I was pissed to say the least. This happened during peak covid in my state, people are unemployed at staggering rates struggling to feed their families, and these pricks are scamming potential hires for fake reviews.
Being unemployed, I had some time on my hands so I screenshotted our convo and posted it all over social media. They went from 3.4 to 1.2 in a few hours with more than 70 new reviews about their lousy behavior.
I was satisfied with that, and a report to the attorney general here.
But then I noticed, the owner had managed to get all the reviews removed, so at that point, I went full nuclear.
I contacted every media outlet, reported them to every oversight board, emailed corporate about it, and reported them to Google.
I managed to get one of our local news outlets to cover it, and Google ended up removing all of their reviews altogether.
Scam me and countless others during a global pandemic? I ruin your business’s reputation for your selfish behavior.”
Don’t Mess With Someone’s Payday
“So, a few years back during the boom of those weirdly specific teeshirts on Facebook, I operated a design agency. My clients were people selling those shirts and I had a couple of designers in my company along with a huge pool of potential hires.
One guy selling thousands of shirts hired my agency, we did some designs for him and since I was stupid, I accepted to be paid after the work was delivered. Surprise surprise he didn’t pay and left me $500 in the hole. I was angry but I moved on since I had a lot of work already.
A few days later I got his email asking if I was interested in designing shirts. The idiot CCed me in the email along with some other designers. Since I had an agency I recognized most of those designers because I had a huge pool of people I would potentially hire. I hatched a plan.
He hired three separate designers. I know that because I still had access to his shared Dropbox folder and I recognized those designers’ names from my pool of potential hires. I waited a week and then sent those three designers an email offering them higher pay. They left that client.
Now the client had no designers and was desperate so he hired me back and gave me $500 along with a 10% commission on shirt sales on TeeSpring that would pass 1000 units. I put that provision in so that I could know what his winning shirts were.
What I started doing was that I would use copyrighted vectors in the design and would upload the design on TeeSpring before sending him the design. Slowly I learned which designs were the winners based on the commission. This is when I struck.
I partnered with the original artists about the copyright infringement to report those designs to TeeSpring and pointed TeeSpring to the original campaigns I uploaded. Teespring returned all the profit made off of those designs to the original artists and I got a sweet $10,000 from it all from the original artists as a courtesy.
Once the mission was accomplished I posted the scammer’s details in every group, forum, and the site ripoff report so that he couldnt hire the next designers easily.
You just dont mess with a man and his pay.”
Slumlord Lands Himself In Jail
“Many years ago, when I worked for a rent-to-own company in a small town, there was a little apartment complex which we made frequent deliveries to, and just as frequently had to repo from. It had been a motel when it was built, and the owner turned it into apartments by just making doorways in the walls between rooms, putting a kitchen and living room in one and a bedroom in the other. The place was very run-down and apparently pretty inexpensive, and based on a few things customers said, it seemed that the majority of the tenants moved in there for a short time. I figured it was because they were waiting for prefab houses to be financed and delivered since the vast majority of housing in that town was mobile homes. Turns out I was wrong, but more on that later.
Between deliveries and pickups, we were visiting this place multiple times per month, but the landlord wouldn’t let us park the truck in the parking lot to do it. It was a motel parking lot, so there was way more space than the tenants needed and plenty of room for our truck, but the minute we pulled into the lot, the landlord would come running out of the office and yell at us to get the truck off his property. We were still allowed to deliver and such, we just had to carry the couches and old-style rear-projection big-screen TVs across the gravel lot from a truck parked on the street. It was more than a little annoying.
Then the day came when I was visiting some customers, a young couple, to have them sign an extension because they couldn’t make their payment, and I saw an eviction notice on their door. I knocked, they answered, and then they, too, saw the notice. They explained that they needed the extension because they were behind on rent, but the eviction was unexpected because they were only two days late. The notice gave them one week to move out. They signed the extension and I left, a little suspicious because that didn’t seem right to me.
A few days later, I got a call from the couple saying they needed to return the stuff they’d rented because they were being evicted and had to move to a motel. I told them to wait there, I’d be over in an hour.
My wife had worked in the rental office of our previous apartment complex, so I knew some tenant laws. When I’d checked after getting the extension signed, I found that evictions couldn’t be served with only a week’s notice, they had to give 30 days for the tenants to pay or move out. If they moved out, the landlord could take any unpaid rent out of their security deposit. This was a small town with lots of mobile homes, so I’m guessing the law was to prevent people from being evicted from rented land on which they had a mobile home they owned, but it applied to apartments, too.
Normally, I’d have considered this none of my business, but everyone in our store hated that landlord and wanted to get back at him, so I printed out the applicable rental law pages from the town’s website and drove over to the apartment complex. There, I knocked on the door of every one of our customers living there, which was about half of the 20 or so apartments, and gave them a copy of the law. While doing this, I learned that the landlord had been evicting people like that for being even a day late, then keeping their deposits, citing the very law I was giving to my customers, just not the part about 30 days leeway. He charged rent in advance (you paid for the next month at the end of each month), so people were losing their deposits over being one day late. On top of that, the landlord wouldn’t accept late payments, even if they were before his scheduled eviction time, because he made more money by evicting people and moving someone new in since he kept all their deposits.
I told the couple that had started all this that if I were them, I wouldn’t move out, and I’d contact a lawyer or at least the city housing department and file a complaint. They were worried because the landlord had said he’d have the sheriff’s department evict them if they didn’t move out in time (there were no local police–small town), but I said that even if the landlord called them, I doubted they’d actually evict them if they cited the law. That was about all I could do, and I hoped it’d be enough.
It was. The couple came in a few weeks later to pay for their rental furniture and to thank me for all my help, telling me the landlord had just been arrested. They’d filed a complaint, and when the landlord called the sheriff to evict them, it had kicked off an investigation. I never learned what exactly the charges were, or what happened to the landlord, but the complex ended up under new ownership, and the new manager had no problem with us parking on their property for deliveries. Also, the number of our reports and deliveries there suddenly dropped, because people were no longer being evicted constantly.
Between that experience and other stories I’ve read online, I never cease to be baffled and annoyed that people don’t know their rights as tenants. Check your laws, don’t take a landlord’s word for anything, and stand up for yourself!”
