Scams you have seen or done

[legion]

I had a great prank played on me 10 years ago.

I had this coworker that was a real pain in the ass. He hardly did any work and what he did do was total and complete crap. He had a penchant for screaming at people to cover for his incompetence. I had his number and he knew it. Our boss barely paid attention to the people that worked for him. He was too busy trying to kiss up to the level above him to ever take notice of the worker bees.

As managers were constantly jockeying for a position that would set them up for the next promotion, we'd get a new manager every 2-4 years. So we got a new manager. The new manager was a bit on the micromanager side. So, during our first round of 1 on 1 meetings with the new boss, my incompetent coworker basically lodged a series of complaints against me that were in fact his own failings. It was hilarious!

For the next four years, I was closely supervised by my micromanager, received crap raises, and was unable to say anything negative about the incompetent a-hole lest it look like pettiness or retaliation. Best prank ever!

Our next boss turned out to be someone he'd screamed at once during a meeting over something an issue that only existed in his mind. (It was completely unhinged.) He transferred to another team with days. So not only did his prank basically stall my career for a few years, he also completely got away with it! Awesome!

[LWJ]

I lived in a house with three other guys my senior year in college.

The guy that owned the house woke up early one morning and opened a window that was just to the side of the bath/shower combo in the bathroom. He then placed a chair outside the house just below the open window. He went back to bed.

When the roommate that shared the bathroom woke up and was taking a shower, the first guy gets up, puts on a hockey mask and grabs the biggest knife he can find.

He stands on the chair and leans into the window. With his head and torso inside the bathroom, he tears the shower curtain back, raises the knife, and yells.

The guy taking a shower collapsed in the tub and started having a mini-seizure.

[Bill Douglas]

A prank, not a scam, but really funny.

A guy asked his room mates to write down the lotto numbers from TV that night for him as he was going out.

His roommates went through his room and found his lotto ticket and wrote down a row of his numbers on the old TV guide and put his ticket back.

Haha, you can imagine the rest.

[BK911]

In bootcamp they'd always send some fool to get a lightbulb repair kit, or blinker fluid, or muffler bearings, or whatever.
During my week of mess duty scrubbing pans, somebody sent me for something.
After a couple of places I finally figured out what had happened, but I kept going along with it until it was time to leave.
Everyone was laughing at me while I was just walking around, as they were scrubbing pots and pans.
They sure got me!

[Bill Douglas]

I used to work in the wool stores. Sheep wool was big export for New Zealand back then. We used to handle the 200Kg bales with large hand held hooks. On day one when the students etc turned up for their summer job the boss would line them all up, tell them about he job, then ask if any were left handed. Then he'd send the left handed guys walking down the street on about an hour's walk to the next wool store to ask if they had any spare left handed bale hooks, they would send them onto the next wool store etc.

Another stunt we pulled at the wool store (14 acre building) was when the truck drives were pushing the bales off one of us would sneak into the cab and pull up the hoist lever. The driver would start up his truck and be driving off down the road with the tray lifting up. All fun and games until one hit an overhead rail bridge.

[rcooled]

Originally Posted by techman1

...bottles, lined up vertically, caps facing out. We would open the door, hold a cup under the bottle and pop the cap!

We had a similar deal as kids, only the bottles were right-side-up in the cooler. Lift lid, open bottle, insert straw...free Coke

This goes back to the era of pay phones and 10˘ calls. Some older kid showed us how to insert a strip of thin plastic down the Dime slot, and then drop a penny in the Nickel slot. You'd get a dial tone, and screw the phone co. out of 9˘. That seemed like such a big deal to us kids...

Several lifetimes ago now, I worked in an engineering office where cigarette smoking was commonplace. In that pre-CAD era, engineers often used horse-hair brushes to sweep off their drafting boards. Every once in a while, some joker would pluck a few individual hairs from his brush and carefully insert them into some new guy's cigarette. Apparently, these hairs tasted pretty foul when the mark would eventually light up, and usually led to some major-league cursing and a huge coughing fit.

[Bill Douglas]

Originally Posted by rcooled

This goes back to the era of pay phones

You have reminded me. We used to "tap" pay phones. Our ones if you tapped the hang up lever correctly it connected you call. If the first digit in the phone number was six you tapped it four times to make it up to ten, and same again for the rest of the numbers. I guess it made us kids good at maths.

[GH85Carrera]

Going back to my first job, one of my duties was to cover the Alabama legislature and take photos and work with the two reporters for the newspaper we were working for. The press room the legislature provided for reporters only had pay phones. The legislature refused to pay for the phones for the reporters, and this was the early 1970s so cell phones were not even a dream.

Anyway one newspaper had a regular phone, but they had a lock on the dial, so you could not call out. One of the reporters showed me how to tap rapidly on the button that hangs up the call. An operator would finally pickup and she would dial a long distance call for you.

The legislature got tired of the reporters showing up on the floor of the senate or the house in ratty clothes, so they decreed everyone had to wear a coat and tie. The reporters all brought in some of the rejects from the back of their closets. They were all coats Herb Tarlek from WKRP TV show would reject as too ugly. It was the 70s remember.

The coats were hung up and if anyone needed to go to the floor, grab whatever coat and tie you wanted and go. The legislature of course changed the rules again, it had to be "appropriate business attire" and the Sargent at Arms had the power to decide if you coat and tie were appropriate.

[Ziggythecat]

Our scam in college was to have someone call a pay phone, collect, and we’d agree and beat it at the end
Long distance calls were expensive..

If they weren’t, we’d never have Apple
Their first product was a device to create tones to scam MaBell

[s_morrison57]

A buddy and I had part time jobs washing dish's for a family restaurant and a separate steak house, all the dishes came to us, so did the near empty bottles of wine and carafes. We'd sort the "used" wine by color, fill the bottles to 90% and then sell them to school mates, told them we bought it, didn't like it -1/2 price. Sold. We'd stock pile it, take a Sat. night off and sell it all within a couple of hours, biggest night of sales was 14 bottles, over $30 bucks, 1970/71, a lot of cash for a couple of enterprising 13/14 yr old's. We were rollin in the dough & thought we were pretty smart. Back in the day when we thought we had it figured out - we knew richard, still do but we laugh about it when we have a beer together, seldom happens, 1000 miles separate us now, to this day neither of us drink vino.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Yep - pay phones were pretty easy to phreak back in the day. We built several varieties of boxes to help make free calls - long distance was a racket. Helped us keep in touch with family and friends much more easily! Ahh, the days before mobile phones!

[oldE]

I think I mentioned this one a few years ago. Almost 40 years ago, we had a HR VP who was a pompous rectal orifice. She probably did more to sour management - union relations than anyone I could recall before or since. When a new contract was signed, I (a lowly middle manager) asked for a copy of the new contract. She photocopied the first and last pages , stapled them front and back of a stack of blank paper and mailed it out to me.
A few days later, she had her assistant mail a true copy, with a note headed: "From the desk of Dianne P...".
I made a copy of the header, attached a scrap of pine which had been chewed by a friend's dog and sent it back to her with a note saying,"I'm not sure why you sent this to me, but perhaps you can repair your tooth marks and use it to mend your desk."
It was after I sent the thing I questioned the wisdom of poking that particular bear, but I lasted far longer at the place than she.

Best
Les

[Bill Douglas]

A friend did this one.

At his work there was a carefully monitored fine wines collection. He noticed there was a bunch excellent pinot noirs of a particular year. He replaced them with the same brand of pinots but from a bad year cheaply bought from the supermarket. No one noticed.