A 48-year-old man and his son, 18, were recently arrested for reportedly defrauding around 100 restaurants in France’s Toulon region in the last 3 years, using a very well thought-out tactic.

Skipping out on the bill at a restaurant isn’t exactly unusual, but doing so about 100 times in a span of 3 years definitely is. On April 3rd, police in Toulon, France, arrested a 48-year-old man and his son on suspicion of defrauding dozens of eateries in the region by leaving without paying the bill. According to a recent investigation, the father-son duo had been using the same tactic successfully for three years, posing as average patrons who simply didn’t have any cash on them and whose credit card didn’t work. The father would apologize for the inconvenience and leave his ID or social security card as collateral until he returned to settle the bill. Only he never came back, opting instead to declare his card stolen and have it reissued.

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Turkish police recently arrested a network of scammers who preyed on people’s desire to get rich quickly by selling them fake treasure maps and charging them extra to help them sell the “priceless” loot.

As part of a complex operation conducted in 9 Turkish provinces, dozens of con artists collaborated to defraud unwitting victims of more than 50 million Turkish lira ($1.3 million) using fake treasure maps. The suspects reportedly traveled around rural areas of the country, showing hand-drawn treasure maps on artificially aged pieces of paper to villagers looking to get rich overnight. The maps were very detailed and featured nearby locations that the victims were familiar with, unlike the scammers, who claimed to be from far away. As they had problems navigating the area to reach the treasure, they offered to sell their maps for a fee. But this was only half of their admittedly witty scam.

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The HR manager of a Shanghai technology company was imprisoned for defrauding his company of millions of dollars by “hiring” dozens of fake employees and collecting their salaries.

The People’s Procuratorate of Minhang District, Shanghai recently released a “White Paper on the Prosecution of Duty-Related Crimes by Company and Enterprise Personnel in Minhang District” featuring a list of duty-related crime cases involving enterprise personnel handled in 2024, one of which attracted the attention of newspapers all over the country. Back in 2022, employees in the finance department of an unnamed Shanghai technology company discovered something strange: Xiao Sun, an employee who had been with the company for half a year and had perfect attendance throughout that whole period, seemed to be a complete mystery to everyone. No one had ever seen them in person or knew anything about them for that matter. The investigation that followed uncovered a massive fraud orchestrated by a single HR manager.

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A 53-year-old woman was scammed into paying hundreds of thousands of euros to a person posing as Hollywood megastar Brad Pitt as payment for hefty medical bills he couldn’t cover due to his divorce.

For more than a year, Anne, a French interior decorator, thought she was in a long-distance romantic relationship with Brad Pitt. This bizarre tale started in February 2023, when the middle-aged woman joined Instagram to share photos from a recent skiing vacation in the Alps. She was immediately approached on the social network by someone claiming to be Jane Pitt, the mother of legendary actor Brad Pitt, who started chatting with Anne and telling her what a good match she was for her son. It wasn’t long before someone posing as Brad Pitt approached Anne on Instagram. They chatted online every day, and before long, Anne fell in love which made her an easy target for a surprisingly effective scam.

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A 21-year-old student from Taizhou, China, managed to extort over 60 different hotels for free stays and financial compensation by creating fake hygiene problems and promising to take actions against them.

Jiang, a resident of Taizhou City, in China’s Zhejiang Province, came up with a particularly gross way of funding his traveling habit when he became short on funds. In September of last year, after deciding to put off university enrollment in favor of using the tuition to travel around China, the 21-year-old man quickly saw his funds diminish, which forced him to come up with an alternative way of covering his expenses. After analyzing his expenditures, Jiang realized that hotels were particularly hard on his wallet, so he came up with a creatively devious way of blackmailing hotel staff into giving him accommodation for free.

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A young English woman who thought she was marrying a “lord” found out that he was a romantic scammer who had already put her tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

27-year-old Megan Clark was working as a manager at a bar on the Isle of Wight when Lord Bertie Underwood first walked into her life. He was charming, kind, thoughtful, and made it very clear that he was interested in her. He claimed to be a descendant of John T. Underwood, who owned the company that sold the Underwood Typewriter in the early 20th century, and certainly looked and acted like a modern-day aristocrat. He would send her flowers at work, buy her expensive gifts from Harrod’s, and drive to London in his Bentley for romantic dates. Lord Bertie Underwood was a dream, so when he asked her to move into his three-story seafront villa, it didn’t matter that they had only been dating for one month. Five months after that, he had asked for her hand in marriage and she accepted.

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Scammers in India managed to set up and operate a fake branch of the country’s largest bank, the State Bank of India, for 10 days in order to trick people into paying to secure stable jobs there.

The people of Chhapora, a village in India’s Chhattisgarh state, were surprised to see a branch of the State Bank of India opening up in their modest settlement, but while some were skeptical from the very beginning, many saw it as an opportunity to get a stable, decent-paying job. 25-year-old Pintu Dhurve was one of the six people who managed to secure employment as a cashier at the newly opened SBI branch, for which he paid 580,000 rupees ($6,900). There were some red flags, like the complete lack of work to be done and the absence of ID cards for employees, but the SBI logo at the entrance, the 1000 sq. foot “workspace”, brand-new furnishings, and operational bank counters all convinced him that the bank was legit. It wasn’t!

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An Indian couple is wanted by police for scamming dozens of unsuspecting victims by promising to make them look young again with the help of an Israeli time machine.

Rajeev Kumar Dubey and his wife Rashmi Dubey pulled off one of the most incredible scams in the history of mankind. The Indian couple owned a therapy center in Kanpur, India’s Uttar Pradesh state, where they allegedly convinced people that they were aging rapidly due to excessively polluted air and claimed that they could reverse the process with the help of an “Israel-made time machine” and oxygen therapy. The Dubeys are suspected of having deceived many elderly people looking for a way of regaining their youth and filling their pockets with 35 crore Indian rupees ($4.1 million).

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Scammers are always finding new ways of taking advantage of gullible people, and apparently selling seeds of fake flowers generated by artificial intelligence is one of their latest techniques.

Artificial intelligence is touted as the next big thing in technological evolution, but right now it also seems to be a perfect tool for scammers looking to take advantage of people who can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. Forget the elaborate scams where AI is used to fake actual people’s faces and voices, or the perfect-looking digital avatars posing as virtual girlfriends for hire, these days people are using artificial intelligence to create fake flowers that look like cute cat faces and selling seeds to clueless plant lovers online. Seeds of non-existent plants with named like “Cats Eye Dazzle” are currently being sold on various legitimate-looking websites, as well as popular e-commerce platforms like eBay or Etsy.

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A Hong Kong finance worker at a multinational company was tricked into transferring $25 million to scammers after attending a video conference with deepfake CFO and several colleagues.

Hong Kong police recently reported that it is investigating an elaborate scam that saw a group of bad actors defraud a multinational firm of $200 million Hong Kong dollars ($25.6 million) using deepfake technology to impersonate company management during a video call. Fraudsters initially targeted one of the unnamed company’s finance workers with an email from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer (CFO). Seeing that the message involved a ‘secret transaction’ to the tune of $200 million Hong Kong dollars, the man suspected it was a phishing email, but those doubts were put to rest when he was invited to a video conference with the CFO and several other colleagues he recognized.

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A Chinese woman was recently charged with fraud for allegedly cheating 3 men out of nearly $100,000 by marrying them in staged ceremonies, despite being already legally married.

The 35-year-old fraudster was already married and raising a daughter when she started dating other men with the specific purpose of defrauding them. It is unclear what drove the woman to a life of constant pretending, because, according to Chinese media, her husband had his own business and the family had a good financial situation. One thing is for sure, though, one of the factors that allowed the woman, known only as Zhou, to juggle between four husbands over several years was the fact that her real husband was always busy with work and didn’t pay too much attention to his wife.

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Nam Hyun Hee, one of the best female fencers in the history of South Korea, recently found herself at the center of a scamming scandal that continues to rock the Asian country.

Last Monday, 42-year-old former fencer Nam Hyun Hee introduced her fiancee to the world. It had long been rumored that the famous athlete had finally found love again after divorcing her husband of 12 years, cyclist Gong Hyo Suk, in August. The two revealed their relationship through an interview and a photoshoot, but instead of attracting support from her fans and the general public, Nam Hyun Hee was bombarded with allegations about her husband-to-be. She had introduced Jeon Chung Jo to the world as a young chaebol (a term used to describe someone from a wealthy business family) who had competed as an equestrian until an injury forced him to retire, but according to everyone who recognized him, he was nothing but a conman, or rather a ‘con-woman’, because he was actually a woman posing as a man.

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A Spanish man stands accused of taking advantage of an overly-religious old woman by posing as her Lord and Savior and asking her to deposit money at His ‘Church of Heaven’.

Could you say ‘no’ to God? What if He called you directly to ask for a favor? Esperanza, an elderly woman from León, in northwestern Spain, could not refuse God when He called her on her telephone and told her to put her savings in His ‘Church of Heaven’, because it offered better interest than earthly ones. The woman never once suspected that she was being scammed, as she was convinced that she was a ‘chosen of the Virgin’ long before receiving the call, so getting a direct call from the Almighty didn’t really seem that strange. Over six years, Esperanza followed God’s instructions and deposited around 300,000 euros in a small drawer at a local convenience store, convinced the money would end up at a heavenly church…

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A Chinese man whose best friend’s wife had introduced him to his online girlfriend of over a year recently learned that the woman he had fallen in love with had actually been his friend’s wife trying to scam him.

Mr. Zhou, a middle-aged man from Xuchang, China’s Henan province, had been trying to raise money to start a family by growing watermelons in Myanmar. He had been gone for years, but he still kept in touch with his best friend, Xiao Li, to whom he confessed last year that his business was going well and that he wanted to meet a good woman. Li told him that his wife had a girlfriend who was also single and that she could introduce them. Because Zhou was still abroad tending to his fruit business, online dating was the only viable option. The two hit it off and agreed to continue their long-distance relationship until Zhou returned to China.

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A Russian man was recently arrested after allegedly being tricked into throwing a Molotov Cocktail in a Moscow bank by scammers who also relieved him of his life savings.

A few days ago, Moscow police arrested a 48-year-old man from Ruza, a town in the Moscow region of Russia, for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail in a Sberbank branch in the Russian capital. Bank employees were able to put out the flames before the firefighters arrived on the scene and police quickly identified and detained the perpetrator. But this was far from an open-shut case; the more the suspect tried to explain, the crazier his story got, and by the end, investigators didn’t know whether to throw the book at the guy or just feel sorry for him…

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