My brother
was in Covent Garden and scruffy looking bloke asks for change. Brother gives him all the shrapnel he has in his pocket. Bloke then picks through the change and hands back the copper to my brother, saying that 'the banks wont take copper'. My brother went fucking nuts. Not surprisingly.
( DumbMonkey The penis mightier than the sword, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 14:15, Reply)

More eBay fun
The beauty of eBay is that it gives you near-total anonymity, and the indicators of who you really are happen to be a great deal of effort to report and follow, which means even if you tell the Police, eBay or whoever chances are nobody's going to give enough of a shit to follow that thread through to an actual identity.

The key is not to make it easy for people. Make it as difficult and as complex as possible, put doubt in their mids if it's even worth following through. A simple 'sell a good and never send' it will get you banned and possibly prosecuted, but something like the following worked a treat -

Actual Story
Back when I was a lad of 17, I picked up a broken PS2 from a pawn shop for some pissant fee of $20 or so. I immediately went home and flogged it on eBay as an 'ex demo model' and fetched over 12x what I paid.
I found a buyer, and sent him the dodgy PS2. When he told me it refused to load discs, I claimed that it must've been damaged in transport and he should've gotten insurance (which he should have, ALWAYS GET IT or people like me will fuck you over without breaking a sweat). When he was unhappy with this answer, I explained that as I was a minor, under Australian law any contract I enter with an adult, THEY have to honour it whereas I do not.

Now at a cursory glance of the law this is true, you'd basically have to consult and pay a lawyer to get technical on why it's not the case, and that'd cost you.
I expect he thought this through and came to the same conclusion, he dropped it after a week and just took the loss.

Now see I was legally in the wrong, but it's about working the person on eBay. I created doubt as to who was in the right, and as to if it was worth pursuing.

I bought a second PS2 for my loungeroom with the money, off eBay ironically. It worked great.
(Leyxia, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 14:12, 35 replies)

Mary Jane
Ok, so its the late 90's and me and a small group of mates have just had the mother of all nights clubbing and popping pills on london. 4am outside the ministry of sound and we've all much a fair amount of smarties. Kicking out time and we decide we need to get some weed or we're never gonna get to sleep. On the way to a cab station i phone my regular dealer who's none too pleased about being woken at that time in the morning but see's the pounds signs in his eyes so tells us to make our way to clapham asap to pick up the gear. we get the bus to away from the center of london nearer to south london and we are walking to the next cab station en route to pick up the weed. by this time dawn is breaking, we're still quite high and talking loudly and (as were still high on smarties) everybody and anybody are our friends. En route to cab station we are overheard taking about scoring the green. we are overheard by two characters, one a 6'5 skinny dreadlocked guy wearing a long leather coat like an extra from the matrix, and the other his sidekick (small hooded mike tyson lookalike).

'are you guys after some weed?' they say

'yes mate, can you get some?' we reply

'yes bruv, we got some round our gaff mate, follow us'.

Now this is where the fun begins..bearing in mind we are still very high. Stupidly I offer to get a cab to thier 'gaff' as we were going to get a cab to clapham any way. so me and a mate (all others had dwindled off by now) and the two complete randoms we've just met 15 seconds ago are in a cab to fucknows where and I'm paying for the cab!. During the cab ride, me and my mate talk the usual shit to strangers you do when your'e high on pills, the other must have thought we were right wankers and I also call us my regular dealer and cancel the order which he's none to pleased about. anyhoo...a 15min cab ride later and we get to our destination. i offer to go inside to get the gear, but they insist i give them the money and we wait in the car whilst they sort it out(alarm bells dont ring as im fucked off my head). i hand over £40 to them and watc them walk into a huge high rise block of falts with a communal front door. 5 mins, 10 mins, 20 mins pass and there is no sign of them. By this time the cabbie is fed up waiting so i need to fork out another £15 quid to him which leaves me completey out of money. So, its around 5.30am in the morning and muggins here has just given £40 to two complete strangers on the premise they were getting me some weed and paid for thier cab home only for them to have fucked off, and i've got no money to get me home. not wanting to accept defeat (and i'm starting to come down off the pills) me and mate decide to go into the door of the high rise blocks our drug mercants went into and decide to buzz about 50 buzzers explaining that we are looking for two black guys who went into get us some weed 40 mins ago and we are still waiting outside. Cue retorts of 'fuck off' 'theyre not here' 'do you know what time it is'. after waitng for an hour we decide that we've been skanked big style, and not only that we have to walk the best part of 4 miles to get home as we have no cash. that was the easiset con in the world for those fuckers...two drugged up pill poppers who gave them 40 quid and paid for thier cab home withi 15 seconds of meeting them. they must have lauged themselves to sleep that night, much to my chagrin.

anyway..lesson learned...never trust two dodgy looking blokes who say they will get you weed at 5.30 am in the morning in south london, no matter how pilled up you are. and its funny how pills really alter your sense of judgement. just say no! i learned the hard way. in hindsight we could have been killed or stabbed, so i guess i got off lightly.

ps excuse the spelling errors but i cant be fucked to go thorough and correct them
(CaptainFellatioNelson is trying to kill me, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 14:11, Reply)

3 fer a pound yer gas lighters
It varies from 2 to 5 depending on how desperate the seller is, but the lighters are nearly always faulty, or simply fail to work.

(Although on one occasion one of them exploded in a spectacular fireball when I tried to light it.)
(Vic Flange, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 14:03, Reply)

I could show you how to get loads of free money
but it involves one of those old A & B phones and a lollipop stick.

Kept me in sweets and pop as a nipper, though.

Length? Long enough to reach the little trip lever up the refund chute, thank you very much.
( MisterPunch did it that way on, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 13:54, Reply)

Deaf and Dumb lighter sales
Okay, not one to normally post but this is one of those ones that's too good to resist.

A good mate of mine who I shall call Steve(oddly enough that's what his parents call him too), was on holiday in the canaries a couple of years ago.

One night he was in a bar with his partner and a few other tourists that he'd got matey with when in walked a young lady who proceeded to place a card on each table explaining that she was deaf and dumb, she would like the good folk of this bar to buy a lighter from her as this was how she made ends meet. My mate Steve smells a rat, he'd been conned by lookie lookie men in the past and was'nt having this at all. He told all and sundry that she was a con artist and even totted up that she must be earning in the hundreds nightly. She catches Steve's eye and quickly hurries round collecting her cards before she is well and truly rumbled.

Steve with an air of smugness, turned round and said to the assembled crowd (clearly impressed with his powers of deduction) 'well that got rid of that scamming bitch' and rather than just sit back and take the plaudits, he had one other final act to perform before being hastily headhunted to Scotland Yard. 'Watch this' says he, the girl was out of the bar which was one floor up and walking down the pavement outside. Steve took a handful of change and threw it so it landed behind her, brilliant jingle jangle noise behind her and everyone in the vicinity turned to look at the pennies from heaven.

All that is, except for one person who carried on walking another 20 yards without flinching and then started having a spectacular argument with her equally deaf and dumb boyfriend in sign language, probably wondering why she had'nt flogged anything.

Steve for his part got the evil eye from everyone in the bar and those who saw it play out from street level. Honestly, throwing coins at a deaf beggar, how low can you go?.

Length?..........never mind the quality, feel the width.
(celticmick_7, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 13:40, Reply)

I'm being conned at work
(then again who isn't) and they want me to sign a shiny new contract for a fractional raise in wages, and a whole lot more work.

So they want me to work harder and longer for a 1.7% raise, and then meet and exceed all manner of retarded targets, along with proof by way of fancy powerpoint presentations.

They're also telling me to work harder, do more stuff and telling me they're going to pay me even more when i can prove to them i'm doing all that new stuff.
More like dangling the carrot in front of the donkey.

Well bollocks to you, i'm off after x-mas probably...along with it seems half of the other managers who feel the same.
That's not including two or three who have left already or are in the process of leaving.

Penny pinching c*nts.
(Temper, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 13:35, 1 reply)

How to scam shops out of fags and money :)
My mate Sam is the cheekiest little bastard I know; He scams people ALL the time, likes to think of it as "his calling"...However, he is very good at it.

He would hardly ever talk about his tricks and techniques, but the one thing he did share with me was the following:

for this you will need:

1 £20 note
1 £10 note

This works 90% of the time in pretty much any convenience shope/corner shop/supermarket etc..

Position a £10 note loosely in your back pocket, and keep the £20 in your hand.

pick a small item of the shelves (choccy bar or something..it acts as a sort of distraction), and approach the counter. put the small item down on the counter, and the £20 next to it. The shop assistant will undoubtedly look down and acknowledge both items.

Then ask for 20 fags. As he turns round to get them, pull the £10 out of your back pocket and swap it with the £20. put the £10 into your pocket. Make sure he doesnt see or detect any of this. There should now be the choccy bar and the £10 note on the counter.

Now..1 of 2 things will happen. Either the shop keeper will not look at the note and so not realise it's now a £10, in which case you will get change for £20 (earning yourself about £5 and a free packet of fags)..OR..he will have looked at the £10 note after getting your fags, assumed that his eyes had been playing tricks on him before when he thought he had seen a £20, and give you change for a ten. In which case, you just calmly say "erm, I gave you a £20". They will pretty much always assume you are right, given that they thought they saw a £20 on the counter in the first place, and reimburse you for rest of the change from your £20 (which was actually a £10).

It works ALOT more than you would think. try it.
(BatCountry organised, attended, and was thrown out on, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 13:34, 3 replies)

When I was living in Islington
There was a girl who used to sit begging outside the antiques market - she wasn't bad looking and she was always polite, so often I'd drop a quid or 50p into her outstretched cup. Most of the time I thought "there but for the grace of God go I" or something like that, and I would often think about how terrible things must get before you're reduced to begging for change on the street. Anyway, fast forward a couple of months and I'm catching the bus back home after a long, long day at work. The bus stops at Angel and the begging girl gets on. I hear her have a couple of words with the driver, and it's obvious she hasn't got her fare. I was about to get up and say "It's okay love, I can spare a quid if you need to get somewhere" when she started screeching, shouting, throwing things around and generally having a proper mental fit. I've never heard a woman swear like that before or since. Anyway, my ride was held up for a good 20 minutes while the driver tried to extricate her from the bus, and by this time she'd moved on from the driver to hurling random abuse at the other passengers, myself included. Real vicious stuff as well. I ignored her by staring out of the window and firmly resolved that she'd got her last pound out of me.
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 13:33, Reply)

Seen in a Peterborough shopping arcade
"THE POUND SHOP - EVERYTHING £1" and the devious shopkeep had stuck on as an afterthought in tiny text "or more"

Pikey. I fucking hate Peterborough.
(Vic Flange, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 13:31, 2 replies)

Don't fall for it
A mate manages a hostel for smack-heads, who are only there (sponsored by the Council) because they're kicking the habit (yeah, right). My mate warned me to beware of any tale involving:

a member of their immediate family (usually sister or mum, hardly ever dad)

hospital (giving birth, dying)

shortage of funds required to reach hospital

That's it.

As soon as he told me, I realised I'd fallen for this at least twice in recent years.

So remember: Relative + Hospital + No money = SCAM.
( MisterPunch did it that way on, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 13:18, Reply)

i was conned into thinking that b3ta was full of geeks and weirdos off the internet
but it also seems to have a fair complement of unrepentant cunts who run scams on e-bay

click I like this! if you remember when this was all fields...
( writerblock ... embedding disabled by request on, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 13:14, 4 replies)

Most pathetic attempt at a con ever.
In Dublin with the G/F, about to take a pic of her on a bridge.

A nice, but rather large and slightly threatening Oirish fellah offers to take our pic, to which I agree, albeit with my brand new rather expensive camera.

He advises us "It'll be a better background if you stand on the other side of the road".

Thinking quickly, I say "Nah - it'll be too dark."

"It's OK - I'll use the flash" he assures me.

"Erm, no - I specifically want that shop in the background - it's special to us" I say.

"Well... SOD YER THEN!" he says, thrusting my camera at me and storming off.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 13:08, Reply)

Hard-up but shops at Harrod's.
Back in the fledgling years of the 90's I was working in London and living on Upper Clapton Road with friends of my sister, not far from Hackney. I loved living there (it was like being in an multi-cultural village) all except for the beggars. No doubt some were genuine (although I've always thought if you can afford hair-dye and a dog, you ain't as badly off as you're trying to make out.) One in particular used to bug me. She would sit on the ground outside the three take-away shops close to the zebra crossing which meant that unless you took your life in your hands and legged it through the traffic elsewhere on the road you could not avoid her. Her habit was to sit and just streeeeetch her hand out pitifully, a pained expression on her grey face - never any words. Still, I never gave in to her silent plea.

Imagine my satisfaction then when one day when waiting for a train out of Liverpool Street to Clapton my sister grabbed my arm and hissed: "Bloody hell, there's that girl from near your flat!" and indeed there she was, all togged up in her finery, hair done, loads of make up and carrying many bags including a Harrod's one. She never conned me, but she must have done well for herself.

I lways glared at her after that. That told her.
(singingringingtree Living in the past., Mon 22 Oct 2007, 13:08, 1 reply)

I needed to use the ATM.
The Lunatic Artist and I were on our way here on Saturday morning when I went to stop to get cash. It was just about 8:00 on a Saturday morning, so all was still rather quiet as we drove. I didn't expect to find anyone at the ATM.

But as I got out of the car I saw two teenyboppers standing at the ATM, so I did the polite thing and stood to one side at a bit of distance. Usually the person at the ATM can see that you're waiting and will take care of their business quickly- but not these two. No, they stood there chattering about what they were going to do that day as they decided how much money to take out, what they were going to buy, how Ben owed one of them $26, how much they loved buying event tee shirts... and all the while they weren't pushing any buttons, just chattering away.

I'm patient to a point- some would say to a fault- but this annoyed the particular piss out of me, as I still had a three and a half hour drive ahead of me. I stood there waiting...

You know how sometimes coffee will have a certain... effect? How it can stimulate your intestine into overdrive?

My two cups of coffee were starting to kick in, and I felt an enormous pressure in my belly so I knew what was coming. I moved to position myself directly upwind of the teenyboppers, about ten feet away, and let loose with a gargantuan Silent But Deadly- the kind where you feel it coming from deep within, the kind where you can feel how horrid it is as it comes out of you, the kind where it almost leaves a visible green mist on the air.

A moment later the conversation at the ATM stopped and was followed by the frantic punching of buttons, the grabbing of cash and card, and the quick departure of teenyboppers. I had said nothing- I didn't need to. A good crop dusting was sufficient.

And that was how I conned two giggling twits into moving along, fast.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Mon 22 Oct 2007, 12:30, 2 replies)

Nuremberg hooker
I went to the FIFA world cup last year in Nuremberg. We held a stag night whilst we were there. One of the guys we were with Tom had lived there for over a year and knew the place well. On the stag night we had been on the lash all day it was about 3am and in the dire nead of a shag. Tom has the fine idea of going to a brothel. So we go to the red light district, which is - as far as im aware legal. there were coppers walkin passed us not battering an eye lid as the prozzies hung out of their windows to the street haggling with prices to the all male passers by.

Haggling is quite an ironic word because 90% of them were hust that - haggish. How these women make money is beyond me.

anyway, we walk passed one girl who is about 22, she is fit, curvy and has nice tits. 60 euros for a shag she says in german to my friend. I accept and out of 10 of my friends am the first one to make a deal that night. i am congradulated and cheered as I leave my friends and follow the girl into her booudwha.

Ok so i walk in - hand over the money and lie down on the bed. i get undressed - her orders.

she gets undressed down to her waist. fine, i thought, maybe she wants me to undress her. she starts to wank me off, i start to feel her up, but she wont let me near her knickers.... it then becomes clear that of all songs to be played in the background, I hear Thriller by michael jackson... a real mood setter.

After approx 15 minutes I stop the girl wanking me and say something along the lines of " we do sexy now?" -= she spoke broken english, but what she said cut the moment like a knife..... " no sexy just shakey shakey..." oh no I thought, uive been duped into paying 60 euros for a wank. Then she made it clear i had 5 minutes left to jizz or I would be thrown out. Again this setting the prefect mood along with Michael jackosn still playing in the background.

I make it claer that her wanking isnt really as good as I could do it. She then offers me - for an extra 30 euros - she would get her friend involved and both of them would suck me off..... wow....now thats an offer.... so i hand over the 30euros, she walks next door to get her friend...

who isnt interested in doing such an act....

so 2 minutes later im back where i started getting an extra 10 minutes hand shuffling time for 30 euros. it takes me all of 3 minutes to jizz. meanign those extra minutes i paid for were for nothing.

Believe me theres no worse a feeling than getting throwin out side cock mid diflation, sobering up, in the daylight, as everyone is passing you going to work, knowing your outside a brothel, dishevled knwoing youve paid 90 euros for a wank...

oh the humanity.

Length? it went flaccid so many times because of the song 'thriller' follwoed by '500 miles' by the proclaimers. I mean come on.... how hard is it to play sexy music....especially in a brothel.
(Dan dan dan They tik urh jerbs!!!, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 11:51, 9 replies)

Free Whisky
I dropped into the supermarket to pick up a few things on the way back from work. As I walked home, I suddenly heard a frantic “clink, clink, clink” and the sound of someone running fast. I turned to see a dishevelled guy clutching a supermarket basket containing six litre bottles of whisky that still had the security caps in place.

The guy sped past me and a few moments later I saw him emerge from a garden sans basket. “Aha!” I thought, “That must mean that the whisky is in the garden!” And so it was – hidden under a car! I quickly liberated a bottle and rushed home to find my hacksaw to remove the security cap!

So that was how I defrauded a thief and a supermarket in one fell swoop!

Length? – well let’s just say mine’s a large one! Cheers!
( Vambo, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 11:35, Reply)

Cashback!!!
I do lots of the online cashback referral schemes but my favourite one at the moment is insurance.

Lloyds & Barclays were competing for business and offering £130 and £120 cashback for taking out a home insurance policy.

I twigged that contents insurance and buildings insurance are different policies rather than all in one building & contents.

SO, taking advantage of the low crime rate in Devon and new house I live in I'm currently getting about £50 - £60 from each of the above for the privelidge of having their insurance for free!

Yup, cashback £120, buildings insurance £62 = profit of £58 and free insurance.

Also, ALWAYS buy your new insurance about 1 or 2 months BEFORE your old one expires (you can postdate the start of the new policy). As they've not yet done your renewal quote the system will treat you as a new customer and give you the preferential new customer rates.

My car insurance this year costs £187, cashback of £130, so I'm insured for £57 for the year!
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 11:22, 2 replies)

Hull Telecoms
Hull is not on BT - Kingston Communications runs the show there, and it's great. Beige phone-boxes!

Anyway: a number of their payphones mistook 1-penny pieces minted in 1992 for 20-pence pieces. Don't know what it was about the 1992 vintage (vingt-age, geddit? Oh, suit yerselves), but they were like gold when I was a stoodint there.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 11:19, Reply)

someone I met while in a remand centre told me
that their lawyer had bribed their psychiatrist $50, so that the psychiatrist would give a false diagnosis - that they had a persecution complex.

I felt sorry for him for quite a while before it clicked.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 11:01, Reply)

I was conned at private school
For 2 years the seniors conned boys in the lower school into being buggared under the guise that we were getting 'dicky back rides'.

It got to a point where Potter-minor and I were unable to sit down during latin prep, and were caned.

Think Nobby's Piles but with pubescant boys.
(Ooh, me chalfonts)
(Vic Flange, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 10:31, Reply)

Monopoly!!!
Last year I decided to do a little experiment on ebay.

McDonalds was doing their monopoly game promotion with all the prizes etc. I quickly sussed that the winning sticker for £10k prize was Bond street (Or Oxford st, something like anyway).

SO, I put a buy it now auction on ebay like this:

"Spare monopoly card for Bond street, duplicate item so not needed. £50".

It sold after about 15 minutes!

A few hours later the buyer obviously thought about it and started asking to confirm that it WAS part of the McDonalds promotion.

"McDonalds? No, nothing to do with that. Like the auction read, spare monopoly card, doesn't mention McDonalds at all."

She went ape shit. Since I live in Devon she was threatening her brothers from the base at Plymouth making a visit etc and got really abusive.

I played it calm and just told her she'd jumpred straight into threats and abuse, she hadn't actually bothered to ask me if we could cancel the purchase.

Eventually the penny dropped, and I agreed to refund her money.

I know I could have kept it but I had a new baby at home and the prospect of some idiot turning up and doing something stupid that might endanger my daughter wasn't worth it.

I wrote her an email explaining that she had been very stupid just buying something without any thought about reading the description which only was 3 lines long.

So I conned her, then let her off.

Ebayers are all too often too greedy and stupid to think through their actions. No wonder Nigerians scam them, it must be like shooting fish in a barrel.
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 10:27, 1 reply)

scrap metal
Many many years ago I was a public school oik. Yes, Okay, throw things now, but blame my parents. I was too young to know any better.

One of the many facilities at our disposal was an indoor rifle range. I discovered:

1) That I had real talent for rifle shooting
2) It involved lying down for half an hour twice in the course of the afternoon, then standing up and having a cup of tea.
3) It beat the crap out of being outside in the cold and rain, being stomped all over, and into, the rugby pitch by the bigger lads.

So I chose rifle shooting as my sports option. The rifle range was getting rather dilapidated and tatty. I lived close to the school and volunteered to renovate it over the summer holiday - repaint it, repair the woodwork, tidy up, etc. The fools took me up on the offer.

I knew the sand in the bullet traps was packed with lead. The first thing I did was spend about a week sieving all the sand and recovering a huge pile of the stuff. Guess where that went ? Yep, straight to the local scrap metal merchants (4 trips in my dads Cortina estate car - he was in on it) and I put over £300 in my pocket. Not bad for 15 years of age in the 1970s. Kept me in beer for ages.

I topped the sand up so that it looked the same and completed the work. At the start of the next term the whole place was spick and span, like new. I was given a 'service to the school' award at the next prize day, something like £50 of books of my choice. Double result.

Please don't waste my time or yours asking if I ever lost a second of sleep over it.
(mad-dog slept with your sister on, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 9:42, 1 reply)

i once saw a
big issue guy who had a portable cd player and was dancing and singing about the big issue

10 out of 10 for creativity but what kind of homeless person owns a cd player, what would he plug it into?

i have often thought the chavy beggers in sheffield work in shifts, mostly because i go to lectures in the morning and on the way home at lunch there is a different guy in the same underpass

but i was actually lucky enough to witness the big issue equivalent of the changing of the guard at the sainsburys on the moor the other day
( Reme Philips laid an epic dump on, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 8:15, 1 reply)

Pretty simple
I spent the entire summer with a bunch of Russian interns, only one of them was 21 (this takes place in America by the by), but naturally I was the driver (I was 20) so whenever we wanted to have a night of опьянение (drunkenness) we'd drive over to the liquor store. Fearful of being carded despite only being amongst a group and not doing the actual buying, I would put on my impeccable Russian accent (and not-so-impeccable grasp of the language) and blend in rather well.

I actually did get asked for I.D. at one point and gave the guy a look of confusion and hurt. "He doesn't have them, he lost his passport" my comrades would then say; "I am just wanting beers, I am sorry" I would cheerfully pipe in.

Off the hook, certainly, but not without a sizeable amount of poor-quality Russian-sounding vodkas that I still haven't gotten around to drinking/pouring down the sink...
( AgentMuu hentai coordination, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 5:23, Reply)

Man of the cloth? Bah.

Conned by a beggar - not a particularly unusual way to have the wool pulled over your eyes, but I think this one deserves a mention.

I live in Asia, and as a result you get a fair amount of buddhist monks begging for alms. These monks are essentially relying on the kindness of strangers to survive - more the fool them, but I like to drop a few coins in their bowl if I see them.

One day I was walking through town and not really concentrating when this man in robes babbling in tounges leaps out from behind a pillar, waving his alms bowl at me . Not really concentrating, I rummage around and give him some coins. Good deed done for the day, thought I.

It was only a few minutes later that I realized that a few things about this monk didn't really add up.
1. His shaved head wasn't as close-cropped as a monk's aesthetic generally should be. I'd say it was around a number 5 on a beard trimmer, and that's a generous estimate.
2. Monks aren't meant to approach you, muttering incantations. They're usually found standing serenely, waiting for some person to bestow a little kindness on them. This guy was waving his little metal bowl right in front of my face in an almost threatening manner.
3. Speaking of alms bowl, he didn't actually have one. What he had was a little metal tin that you buy in the market, rather than a big brass bowl that you strike like a gong.

Bollocks, thought I.

To be fair, the rest of his getup was convincing enough to pass first muster, but these days I find myself treating monks with a lot more suspicion than they probably deserve.

If you go to Asia, beware the fake monk con arists.
(schnuff, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 5:10, 1 reply)

eBay + Banned WoW account = Profit
Anyone who's familiar with eBay even a little probably realises by now that despite all their big fancy security claims and safety nets, unless you're pulling off repeated, major cons then chances are they won't even bother to enact them.

Anyway more on that later - My World of Warcraft account was banned for what were some pretty lame reasons so I decided to at least get some compensation from the situation.

Blizzard has always frowned on WoW accounts being sold, but back in the day you could still list them on eBay provided in the small print you stated the auction was for the time spend playing the game and gaining items/levels, and not for the actual characters/items themselves, which always remain property of Blizzard Inc.

Basically, I listed the banned account on eBay half what it would otherwise fetch ($800) in the hope of some quick excited twat snapping it up without looking too hard at the fine print, which stated the usual but also specifically that the auction was for the time put into playing the account, and not it's items, level or account status
Lucky me, Mr. Twat did come along only a half hour after the auction was listed, not wanting to let such a bargain slip away.

A few hours after payment was made I had one VERY pissed off buyer in my hands... But since I was going on holidays it didn't bother me. I get back a week later to find over 40 emails ranging from polite begging to furious, poorly written legal threats.

The kicker was that my small print didn't even cover me from a legal standpoint technically, but since a) eBay doesn't care to get into disputes unless it's cut and dry, and b) I managed to convince him I'm legally in the right and he should take this as a life lesson, he never ended up pursuing it with either authority.

I was half considering selling the same account again, until eBay disabled all WoW listings recently.
(Leyxia, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 1:52, 9 replies)

Got off a bus in Hackney
and some guy came up to me and asked for 2 quid. I said I didn't have any so he said, "Nah, mate, it's for crack."
So I gave him the money.
Not a scam as such, but I liked his honesty
(Creamy Discharge Freeze Motherstickers, this is a fuck up, Mon 22 Oct 2007, 0:47, Reply)