We often encounter scams we can’t recognize or don’t want to admit. A user on the forum asked, “What’s the biggest scam in life that no one wants to admit?”
Here are 17 everyday scams that we often overlook.
CLICK HERE TO UNSUBSCRIBE MAILS
When they tell you to click here to unsubscribe to this email notification.”
“Having to log in to unsubscribe is even worse. It’s a ploy to increase account activity stats.
Just mark the mail as junk; it increases the company’s spam score amongst email providers.”
PAYING TO WATCH ADS ON TELEVISION
“Normal television, paying to watch ads!”
“Now we have streaming subscription services where you pay to watch ads! Progress!”
UNLIMITED DATA
“The funny/not funny part is that they advertise unlimited data up to a certain number. And government regulators allow those companies to get away with it.”
“Unlimited data! …until you use too much, then they slow down your data so much that you can’t even watch a 480p video without a slowdown. But hey, unlimited, right?”
FREE TRIALS
“Free trial! -Nice.
Enter your card details – NOT SO NICE.”
PRICE OF BABY PRODUCTS
“The prices of anything baby related. Toys, food, clothes, etc. On Saturday, I was in a store to get a cot mattress and cover. I cried.”
“We bought dog poop bags to dispose of diapers on the go because it was so much cheaper than a “baby” equivalent (a tiny roll of those bags lasts forever in a diaper bag). Put “baby” in a product name and suddenly it’s so much pricier than an equivalent product not marketed the same way.”
ONLINE CONVENIENCE FEE
“My bank has free bill pay and will mail them a check if they don’t have any other option. So now they get a check from me, and the “inconvenience fee” is their own cost to process the thing, get paid slower, etc.”
THE WEDDING INDUSTRY
“To be clear, not marriage but weddings specifically. I’m happily married to my wife, and we were content to do something special just the two of us, maybe spend a couple of grand and treat ourselves to something amazing.
The families get involved, and before we knew it, we’re spending closer to twenty grand on one day and feeding a bunch of people I’ve not heard of before or since the wedding.”
FASHION TRENDS
“Fashion trends create an incredible amount of waste. If everyone learned how to mend/alter garments in school, and value was placed on investing in a few quality made items instead of a closet full of disposable fast fashion, there would be way less clothing in landfills and way less demand for chemical-laden garments to be cranked out in sweatshops. Our relationship to clothing is so warped.”
CLAW MACHINES IN ARCADES
“Specifically, they’re programmed to pay out after x-number of dollars. Claw games with cheap stuff like stuffed animals will pay out relatively frequently. Things like the stacker game or the keyhole game with “big ticket” are programmed to pay out at a much lower rate.”
THE EASY-TO-JOIN, DIFFICULT-TO-CANCEL SUBSCRIPTION MODEL
“The Wall Street Journal makes you telephone them to cancel your online subscription. They have the technology to accept subscriptions online. But not to cancel them online.”
GLOBAL COMPANIES CARE ABOUT YOU
“That large global companies actually care about you. We’re in this together. The biggest bag of nonsense I’ve ever heard from a company.
Every time I saw those commercials that said that I was mad. It’s BS marketing.”
TICKETMASTER
“I used them to go see my first comedian. I got two seats priced at $90 each. My total was $313. I’m not good at math, but I knew something was wrong. Their fee per ticket is just nuts. I got seats about $45 each, and it still cost me almost $200.”
“I wanted to get my husband Steely Dan tickets for Christmas. Tickets were $75 each. The total was $212. The fees almost equaled the cost of another ticket. I didn’t buy them.”
THE SUBSCRIPTION-BASED ECONOMY
“This makes me so angry. Why does everything have to be a subscription now? I mean, I know why, but I still hate it.
The bigger scam is hardware that requires subscriptions to work. Off the success of other subscription services, companies have figured out this is a great way to keep reoccurring revenue instead of selling you a product once and not seeing any money from you until you replace it.”
US PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE
“Cutting out the middle man would save everyone money. It blows my mind we haven’t changed anything ‘we’ haven’t changed anything because the insurance companies flow so much money to Washington that they all turn a blind eye to this.”
AIRLINES ALWAYS OVERBOOK
“The fact that airlines have X amount of seats per flight, but almost always sell X+10 seats and then refund you about 80% of your ticket cost. Do that to ten people, and suddenly you have about two tickets worth of profits seemingly out of nowhere, and everyone still has a flight. Just an unbelievably immoral way to gain a few bucks, but everyone goes with it since the airplanes aren’t exactly a train that comes every 10 minutes.”
TIPPING CULTURE
” It’s how businesses scammed the general public into paying additional costs so they could avoid paying their staff a living wage.”
“The other day, I went to eat out, and when the check came, the cc machine now had the suggested tip starting at 25% all the way up to 45%. Oh, and when I looked at the check, they had already served themselves with 18%!!!”
40-HOUR WORK WEEK
“As an employer, i’d rather have people who want to come to work and have an enjoyable amount of time off, saying maybe a 30-hour work week at high efficiency, rather than being a Walmart type, having a 40-hour work week with essentially 10 hours of actual work being done. In my unprofessional opinion, I believe it would have to be completely mutual. The employee would have to work harder and be efficient during the lowered amount of time, and the employer would have to pay a livable wage, say maybe 25 or 30 dollars an hour at the least. Nothing less than 20.”
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Anika Jindal
Anika is a CPA and founder of What Anika Says. She shares simple and actionable frugal living, money management and money-saving tips to live a debt-free financially independent life. She has been featured on popular websites like Bankrate, Forbes, Mint ,and Authority Magazine. Byline: MSN