Posted on 07/14/2011 12:42:57 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Fell for the 'French bread which is so delicious that it will make you cry' scam
A Taiwanese man reportedly paid about $400,000 for a croissant he never got to eat.
The man, only identified by his last name, Chiu, reportedly fell for an Internet scam that promoted, "French bread which is so delicious that it will make you cry," reported Apple Daily.
Chui reportedly saw the photograph of the alleged croissant and proceeded to transmit 99 Taiwan dollars to the bakery through an ATM. Someone from the company then called him to say there was a mistake and he had to repeat the transaction, which he did.
A second phone call came from a "bank manager," asking him to repeat the transaction, and then a third from someone who posed as a representative "from the Monetary Supervision Commission," asking him to repeat the transaction to avoid charges of money laundering.
He had transmitted 12 million Taiwan dollars before realising he had been scammed.
Mr. Chiu sounds like a meathead.
Pity.
At some point you have to wonder if the criminals might make more intelligent use of the money.
What do you think? Should he send one more payment, just to make sure?
Somethin' ain't right here.
Yea... but did he ever get is croissant???
It would be nice touch to send him the croissant.
No...and yet it still made him cry.
That’s a lot of dough.
Monetary Supervision Commission. I gotta try that sometime.
Of course, the whole point of the story is...
That a man named "chew" never got to eat his croissant.
-PJ
He should meet my Nigerian friends - one of them is the son of a General and will be sending me $12 million any day now!
Somethin' ain't right here.
While I've heard of slow learners before, this goes beyond ridiculous.
How could that number of calls/transactions have possibly been accomplished in any reasonable time frame? Even doing a hundred transfers a day, seven days a week, would have taken over three years.
Hey,Chiu! I got a 300k bottle of Tums I’ll let you have for 200k. That’ll help you out. Just looking out for you, buddy.
i’m guessing the $400,000 is in taiwanese dollars (nice reporting)
at the current exchange rate ($1 taiwan == $0.0347 USD), $400,000 taiwan would be about $13,880 USD
of course, it would still mean he complied with 4,000 requests for verification from the scammers
not very bright
i’d guess the 12 million taiwanese dollar figure to be inaccurate
4,000 transactions seems a bit more likely then 120,000
At 99 dollars a pop....that's a hell of a lot of transactions.
The penultimate moron.
But they’re sending them in Taiwanese dollars...
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