30 Examples Of “100% Scams” Which People Nevertheless Aren’t Aware Of, As Shared By Members Of This Online Group
Animals have such a wonderful thing as a conditioned reflex - a mechanism for remembering positive or negative (mostly) conditions in certain situations. Birds remember not to fly into fields where there is a scarecrow, a cat understands where its tray is, a dog knows perfectly well who feeds it and who walks with it... You can give endless examples, but there is one exception in the world of living beings. Yes, that's right - people.
In fact, our consciousness is both a great blessing and a great source of various problems. After all, no matter what conditioned reflex a person develops, we can always overcome it if we really want something. And often we play havoc with ourselves, stepping on the same rake over and over again.
We convince ourselves that this time we will definitely win at the casino, that we are used to unloved and not very well-paid jobs, that the charismatic and spectacular politician will keep all of their numerous and generous campaign promises... We believe again and again, we are wrong again and again - but very rarely do we draw the right conclusions from our own mistakes.
Recently, a true viral thread appeared in the AskReddit community, the topic starter of which asked people just one question: "What's 100% a scam but we accepted it in our society?" As of today, there are already exactly 35K upvotes and more than 34.1K of a wide variety of comments, from really serious and vital ones to jokes as well, but still fully answering the original question.
Bored Panda has compiled for you this selection of the most popular, sometimes unexpected, sometimes instructive and anyway incredibly interesting viewpoints from the original thread, so please feel free to scroll to the very end of it, upvote the ideas you support most and of course add your own - and who knows, maybe this list could become really helpful for someone.
More info: Reddit
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America’s tipping culture. The fact that businesses have put the burden on consumers to pay their employees livable wages is a joke
For profit prisons
This should never have been allowed to happen. It creates an incentive to incarcerate people, to keep the prisons profitable. It’s all about money, and the people don’t matter, except as a means to profit off their misery—-which ain’t the f*****g point of prison.
Subscription services for f*****g everything
Paying hundred of dollars per month for health insurance and then insurance not paying for anything until you’ve hit your deductible (usually thousands of dollars per year) and then after hitting your deductible insurance only paying for a certain percentage of your care until the end of the year until your deductible resets and you pay out of pocket all over again until you hit the deductible and even after hitting the deductible your insurance is fighting tooth and nail not to cover anything.
Convenience fees on electronic payments
Convenience fees are ALL a scam - yes, looking at you TicketMaster. You can NOT buy tickets unless you go through TicketMaster, it is not a convenience, it is extortion.
That it’s considered normal to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding/ring/bachelor party
Too much money wasted just for everyone else to party. I've seem too much loans and debt. Just get legally married and have a small get together. Much more intimate and you actually get to hang out. In a wedding you never actually get to hang out with friends.
Mum "influencers" using their kids as bait to advertise products. Absolutely despicable.
Influencer culture on the whole...more like influenza....amirite.
Not as accepted as it was but the idea that alcohol is safer than other illegal or recently legalized substances
Alcohol is one of the few substances from which a user can die during withdrawal.
Justice System.
Crimes are punished unequally. Whether it's because of how laws are written, socioeconomic background, judicial discretion, DA's refusing to prosecute, or ect.
Most laws are just designed to protect the rich and their property.
The right (or refused right) to repair. Absolute b******t that i cant fix my own s**t.
Unpaid lunches that extend your work day.
College bookstores
The editions, my goodness...every year. I bought a 4th edition last year for $5 of eBay and it was 100$ cheaper than the 6th edition...the main difference? The new one was printed in color. Lol
TurboTax. They lobby the government to make it difficult to do taxes without their software. I lived in the UK and it took literally 15 min to do taxes on bad government software
You can do them for free in the US as well. On a lousy government website. It's just not as popular or widely known.
Herbalife 🌿
I watched John Oliver's piece on this...it's absolutely horrible.
Middlemen/Brokers eating up the profit and inflating the prices in pretty much every business.
On a lighter note, Santa Claus 🎅🏻 🎅🏻
Unlike other scams, I am 100% OK with this continuing.
Arbitration clauses in almost every service provider contract. Tricking you into giving up your access to the court system. Nobody talks about it, but they should.
And binding arbitration, to boot. That means that, if the arbitrators decide against you, it’s final. You have no means to appeal their decision. You also cannot discuss the particulars of the case with anyone. Binding arbitration clauses are the worst option, especially if the company requiring it also gets to choose the arbitrators.
As an academic scientist pick one of these two: We use tax payer money to fund biomedical research, which we then write up into a research study and pay the Journal so that they can publish the said study only for the journals to turn around and put them behind a paywall.
We also use taxpayer money to fund years of biomedical research, which occasionally results in a groundbreaking drug/treatment, which then gets licensed out (usually) by a pharma company, which then marks up the price and turns around and charges the taxpayer an absurd amount of money to use the said drug.
Edit: Additional salt to the wound: Do you guys know Moderna (which made the mRNA covid vaccine) and the NIH (the federal institute that performed initial pre clinical research on the mRNA vaccine and also literally funded the research) are in a patent dispute over the vaccine?
The research papers themselves are almost always available for free on arxiv.org (or similar). The journal fees are for the peer review, which determines the actual value of the studies.
I don't think it's a scam, but the prices like "4.99$", when it's clearly 5$, but they know most of the people will tend to think subconsciously it's 4$
In the US, we still have gas prices list with 9/10 penny like $4.99 9/10 - so ridiculous.
Worked at CapitalOne Investing for a while. Came to understand that the 401(k) system is merely the base layer of a congressionally-sanctioned Ponzi scheme to prop up our stock market. If 401(k) contributions were to dry up tomorrow, the entire house of cards collapses.
There is now legislation that proposes increasing the contribution limits and even making 401(k) participation MANDATORY for some employers. A healthy financial system wouldn’t need such measures.
luxury skincare. go to a dermatologist. pay less. get real results.
If you can afford to buy product month after month for your acne or another condition, go to the dermatologist and get something that might cure it. Proactive and that sort of thing will just keep taking your money forever. If you just want to copy a Korean 7 step beauty routine, then you're going to spend way too much anyway.
Note: this post originally had 34 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
