The lengths to which so people will go to get scammed

As the saying goes, "a fool and his money are soon parted". And sometimes one doesn't even have to be a fool in order to get scammed out of one's money. Some scams are really elaborate and deceitful, and masterfully fools even very smart and knowledgeable people into giving their money to strangers... only for them to run away with it, never to be seen again.

Yet, sometimes even very simple scams can fool some people. Not necessarily "simple" as in consisting of just a few very simple and easy steps, but "simple" as in "so blatantly unusual and suspicious anybody with half a brain cell should start hesitating". It's actually sometimes incredible the lengths to which some people will go in order to get scammed.

As demonstrated daily by many so-called scambaiters (eg. on YouTube and Twitch), there are many forms of scams that can be done purely via telephone calls. The scammer (most usually from the other side of the world) just calls people and just convinces them to send money.

For quite many years by far the most common way to ask for money is via gift cards (such as Amazon gift cards, Target gift cards, Google Play cards, etc.) This is because it's by far the easiest and fastest way to get money from someone (because it's enough to tell the gift card code number via phone) in a way that's completely untraceable and uncancellable (there's essentially no way to undo the purchase of a gift card or cancel its use once it has been used). This is significantly better from the scammer's perspective than eg. billing a credit card or a bank transfer because those are highly traceable and cancellable. Gift cards are also a significantly easier method than eg. having the victim purchase and transfer bitcoin (and bitcoin, while very good for scammers, is also not completely untraceable).

However, this has not always been so. Before gift cards became the primary go-to form of sending money to scammers, they were using other more crass methods. Some of them were quite incredible in terms of how far the victims had to go in order to get themselves scammed.

Usually the scammers pretend to be from a reputable company, like Microsoft, Amazon, Geek Squad or the like. This in itself should help raise suspicion when they present a very odd and unusual method of sending them money (that the victim has been fooled into believing that he owes them). No big reputable company like Microsoft or Amazon would ever, in a million years, ask anybody to send them money in this manner (or in the form of gift cards), yet many people still fall for it and never grow suspicious enough as to put a stop to the scam.

One of these egregious forms of the scammers instructing the victim to send them money consisted (and in a few cases may even still consist) of these steps:

1. Physically go to the bank and withdraw a very substantial amount of physical cash (wire transfers and credit cards are never good for the scammers). Often in the order of thousands of dollars, sometimes even tens of thousands of dollars.
2. The victim is instructed to lie to the bank employees if they ask anything. The victim is strongly instructed to not tell them, or anybody, who the money is actually for, keep it secret, and directly and blatantly lie about it.
3. Go to a convenience store or a postal office and buy a cardboard box and either a newspaper or a book.
4. Once back at home, put the money inside the newspaper or book, but not all in one bunch, instead spreading it between many of the pages. If it's a book, it should be then wrapped with some paper or newspaper, and then it should be put inside the box which is then sealed.
5. Go to the post office to send the box to an address given by the scammers. Once again the victim has to lie about what's inside the box and who it's being sent to, if asked.
6. The victim must not tell anybody about anything related to this. Not to family, not to friends, not to neighbors, not to the bank or post office workers, not to police, nobody. If anybody asks, the victim has to lie about it and invent some story (like that he's sending the money to a family member, or to buy some gift for a family member).

In other words, at every step the victim is to act like a criminal who is secretly and furtively sending some stolen money to his accomplishes, keeping it all secret and on the down-low...

Except that it's the victim's own money that he's furtively and secretly sending to completely unknown strangers who the victim knows nothing about, other than hearing them talk on the phone. In other words, the victim is, at every step, helping steal his own money, and sending it to strangers somewhere.

And at no point do some of these victims grow suspicious enough as to stop it. They just follow the instructions given to them, they lie to people if need be, they keep it secret, they tell nobody, and at no point do they stop and think about it, that there's something wrong about this. Why would some Microsoft or Amazon employee ask him to do this? What sense does that make?

Even if some... more naive people get fooled into actually going to the bank to withdraw enormous amounts of cash, it would be so easy to just be suspicious enough to consult with the bank worker about it. Just ask the bankteller's opinion and perspective on it. But no. These... naive... victims are told by a complete stranger on the phone to not tell anything and if necessary outright lie, and they just do as told.

It's sometimes incredible the lengths that some people go in order to get scammed.