Pay Up For Your Free Vacation

from the people-really-are-suckers dept

It's somewhat amazing to look at all of the scams people fall for online. From Nigerian 419 scams (where the victims still don't believe they were conned) to boiler room operations hawking non-existent dot com stocks, it's clear that David Hannum (not P.T. Barnum) had a point in claiming: "There's a sucker born every minute." The latest online scam to come to light was an online travel scam where people in the UK were promised "free vacations." Of course, to get those "free vacations" you had to pay thousands of pounds to get a "key" to a website. Once on the website, it turned out that the deals for vacations either were fake or not that appealing anyway. Still, you have to wonder who pays so much for a key to maybe get a vacation they don't know about? Also odd about this story is it appears those guilty of running it were simply barred from running another company. It's unclear from the article if they received any additional punishment.
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  1. identicon
    Tom Pearson, 25 May 2005 @ 12:06pm

    Not George Hull either

    If you read the entire story on the history buff site to which you link, the quote, "There's a sucker born every minute," is actually attributable to David Hannum.

    See: http://www.historybuff.com/library/refbarnum.html, penultimate paragraph.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. icon
    Mike (profile), 25 May 2005 @ 12:20pm

    Re: Not George Hull either

    Whoops. Fixed.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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