Someone Tried to Scam Me...Through My Comedy?
Instagram Isn't Safe
The title says it all, but this is a weird one. While I’ve already mentioned my love of train YouTube—there is another area I love—phone scam videos. These are people on YouTube that pretend to be older people, and try to get scammed by phone scammers. When that happens, the person making the video will usually get into the scammers computer and make them have a bad time. This is typically done by deleting all of their photos, or pretending to have sent the money to the wrong place. Really, the true act of heroism is wasting these scammers’ time. If they are spending all the time on the phone with someone who knows what they’re about—they’re not hurting innocent people.
So behold, to my surprise when I receive a message on Instagram earlier this week asking if I do commisions.
Now clearly I’m not above $200, but I was already suspicious. What part of my stand-up comedy makes this person think “This would be great for my five year-old’s birthday”? I kept the messages going in case it was legitimate—and I need content—so here we are.
A lot to unpack in this message. She wants a video recording for her daughter where I write jokes about Tom & Jerry? I think these little details were here to lure me in—make me believe this is a real person. Honestly it worked. I thought this might just be a weird request.
The passive agressive “Hello?” almost made me drop out. Often times in scams you’ll see the scammer get super aggressive for no reason. I don’t know if this was a tactic or what, but hey I guess it worked. They got me to keep talking. Now, let’s jump ahead to when it starts to get mildly scammy.
Now I was revealed the truth. Hailey, this person’s daughter, has a manager? Is she like Honey Boo Boo? Am I making a comedy video for a young child star? The pressure is on now. This is actually where I started to think it was a scam. Before I was on the fence. I thought maybe this lady is just a good mom and wanted to buy a gift she could replay for her kid at a restaurant or an audition to get her to stop screaming.
Saying that I wanted to take a few days to think on this before they payed me—then they pushed sending the money—also didn’t help in making this seem like not a con. In order for their grift to work, they have to make me think they’ve paid me already. I’ll get into more details shortly but the next image will start the main scam.
Oh no, Hailey’s dad made a clerical error! The check is for $2000 not $200. What a simple mistake. Surely they’ll just reissue the check.
I was 100% out at this point. I had my finger on the block button just waiting for the scam beat to drop. Anytime you’re talking to someone on the phone, or by message, if they message there has been an “overpayment” of any kind. You got yourself a scam.
Whoop, there it is.
Here we have a classic refund scam. They were going to take this two different ways.
First, I would give them my Venmo or Zelle, which is why I blocked them at this point. Never give out your real info—even if you’re just trying to mess with them. Then they would most likely send me a request for $2000 instead of a payment. I’m not entirely sure about Zelle, but I know Venmo very much operates on a no take-backsies basis. So if I received the request—but wasn’t paying attention and accepted it—I would be out $2000.
The second way—the kind that would’ve taken up more energy on their part—would be to make a fake screenshot of my Venmo or Zelle account so it looks like they sent me the money. This is commonly how they do it with phone scams. They will use the Developer Tools built into most web browsers to make a bank, Venmo, or PayPal webpage look like they legitimately sent you money. Below is an example where I change the text in dev tools to on my own website.
Then when they send the screenshot—even though it doesn’t reflect that way on your online banking—they still send it to you in a message and make it look like they overpayed you by mistake and you need to send it back.
Then when you say:
“I don’t see that on my bank account.”
They just make up some bologne like:
“Oh there must be a delay, but I need you to refund the money to me now.”
The trick of course being there never was any money.
I’m sharing this because I think everyone needs to be aware of these kind of scumbags. At first I thought it was a strange idea to grift comedians, but then I realized people on social media are the perfect targets. They contact you on there and it makes you feel imporant. I know I did. I was like “Wow, someone wants to hire me to do comedy just based on my videos!” Turns out that’s too good to be true. Hopefully you can see this and now if you ever get messages like it you can block them. Sometimes this Substack can be educational and not about obscure video game history at the same time.