this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
207 points (99.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
638 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In a trains station gave someone enough money for a ticket cuz he was claiming that he lost his train. Felt real stupid when I saw him the next day asking the same shit.
Consider that at the time you were helping a stranger with the relatively trivial cost of a train ticket.
Now you know you "helped" a likely homeless dude.
Technically a scam but a pretty minor one.
Probably not homeless, pretty well dressed, that was probably his day job.
An assumption on my part.
I'll argue that not everyone begging for coins is scamming though some probably are. Trying to figure out which is just a recipie for misery.
Train tickets by me cost 4x an hour of minimum wage work. Even if a single person helped per hour, that's more than enough to make it worthwhile compared to a paying job. That's a scam, taking advantage of people's help as a regular living rather than making an honest living.
Train tickets near me have a variable cost depending on how far you're going, but the bus costs about 1/4 or 1/5 of minimum wage per hour...lol
That's a much more costly train ticket than I was imagining.
I was assuming something like the inverse of that: a quarter of an hour of minimum wage.
That does tip the scale back to scammy.
Person you responded to was not the original poster. Not sure why they've felt the need to inject extra information that is entirely unrelated to the comment you replied to. Seems pretty scammy to me
I guess I just got scammed.
I fell for this one in college. At the time I felt really stupid, but it was less than $20 and that guy probably needed it more than I did.
This happened to me in a Walmart parking lot with a guy telling me a sob story about how he's traveling with his family and out of gas (with a gas can in his hand). I didn't give him any money but saw him there in the parking lot a couple weeks later and he gave the same story obviously not recognizing me from before.