this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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Asklemmy
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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.
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.
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.