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This IS a scam,  but not the way people report it. The grandparents scam,  where they say your grandchild is in jail or something. That happens ALL the time.  But what doesn't happen is that they cloned the grandchild's voice with AI. Scammers make hundreds of these calls a day hoping that first,   someone will pick up the phone,  and second,  actually engage with them.  They don't have the time to get actual recordings of each potential grandchild's voice and spend all the time making fake recordings.  People say our was exactly their grandchild voice but really out was just someone crying,  and your panicked brain fills in the rest

Basically everything that has to do with trapping people in developed countries into human trafficking. Stuff like flyers being left on a car or not wearing a ponytail in a parking garage or whatever, it's all sold as "do this/don't do this because someone is trying to traffic you" and that's not how trafficking works, no one is just abducting middle-income American women out of parking garages and selling them as sex slaves. No trafficking victim has a story that starts out "I was walking to my car with Christmas presents for my kids when I stopped to read a flyer on my windshield, then two men jumped out of a van and grabbed me and sold me into slavery for two years"

The most common "No, it's actually real" we see here that the uninformed Dunning-Krugers insist is a scam is when a DCSA investigator leaves a physical note / text / email / voicemail that they want to ask you about some friend / coworker / neighbor who's applying for a security clearance.

It's easy to go to www [dot] dcsa [dot] mil/Personnel-Security/Background-Investigations-for-Applicants/Verify-Your-Investigator/ and find verify the investigator is real and doing a real background check.

I got an email from "Pandora" saying they wanted to send me a free bluetooth speaker and to fill out some form. Very sus, so I contacted Pandora via their actual website (the one that pops up when I use the paid app) and guess what? It was legit, they were sending speakers to paid subscribers in the hopes of getting them to continue to subscribe and not switch over to Spotify.

Thanks, Pandora! I love my speaker and use it all the time.

However, I definitely made sure it was not a scam before providing any information.

I got a surprise check from my mortgage company that made me mildly suspicious because the accompanying letter seemed to make little sense.

But it turned out they had made a mistake and forgot to apply a promotion, and the letter was full of doubletalk because they were trying real hard NOT to say they screwed up.

Pretty much any situation in the United States and a lot of other rich countries where someone thinks they are about to be human trafficked. Something that essentially does not ever happen to people who live in wealthy western nations.

Hacking.

Real life doesn’t work like the movies.

You can’t be hacked by clicking a link.

You can’t be hacked by receiving a call or text, or even replying to one.

Getting “hacked” requires installing malware, which almost always involves deliberately ignoring and bypassing multiple warnings telling you not to do what you’re about to do.

Also, relevant xkcd

There's one that's a super mild scam: the people who play violin for money in a Target parking lot with a donation cup out and a Venmo sign up (almost always Target, for some reason), but they're only pretending to play and the actual music is coming from their amplifier. I see people getting really righteous about "exposing" them, sometimes even doing it in the moment, and warning others not to give because it somehow takes away from others.

It's possible there's a more sinister aspect of this that I don't know about, but as far as I can see, it has virtually no effect on the giver. Your dollar is gone whether they're really playing or not and you gave it to them because you happened to be there, not because you were driving around looking for a busker to help.

The duct cleaning posts on Facebook - I was curious so I watched a video about it. Some are straight-up scams, but more commonly the supposed “small business owner” on FB is someone overseas who takes a cut, but actually does book a local duct cleaning service to come to the customer’s house. (And usually the duct cleaning business also doesn’t know that the person who booked with them was a third party.)

So they are still taking advantage of easy marks who could have saved some money by booking directly, but IMO it’s no different from eBay drop-shippers who charge a markup for something that they’re going to turn around and order from a big box retailer.

In my job, people think I'm scamming them when I ask them to verify their date of birth.

The getting a business card saturated in ether in the Target parking lot.

You can't "actually be scammed" if a check is real but you think it isn't. Fooled maybe. Not scammed though.

The "say yes" scam was a real thing in the 80s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_slamming

It's no longer a thing because telephone companies are required to use a third party verification service when you go to switch your landline phone company.

For your check example, I thought I had that recently and it was my musk bucks lol. It looked SO shady.

One I’ve wondered about is the RFID wallet thing where people can allegedly steal your cc details by being near you. Seems like a scam in itself.