Guy Tracks Scammer Down, Leaves Voicemail For Scammer's Dad

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    Text - r/ProRevenge u/dstrezzd • 58m + Join A stranger scammed me out of $300 online. I tracked him down, called his dad's work phone, and got my money back. Long post, TL;DR below. Early last year I was deep in depression, spending the Spring in my room (I work in a seasonal industry which pays just enough to live on during the off months.) All I did was play video games all day which led to me getting into game marketplace sites and planning on starting a side hustle selling in game items and
  • 02
    Text - The way these transactions are supposed to go is this: A reputable middleman (There were several known MM in the community that I joined) takes in the product and the payment, verifies both, then distributes both ways after taking a cut for their services. This circumvents the "you first" prolem where you have to trust solely in the other guy to not scam you. -Well.. They impersonated a middleman well enough to fool me. I admit that it was 100% on me, I didn't know what I was doing. I jus
  • 03
    Text - At this point I know game's over and I just got scammed, but I went along with it as a sad parting gift to my first "sale." I message C and asked him how this was going to go. He told me he'll just direct paypal me the $300 now and apologized, which didn't make sense to me (you already scammed me, why haven't you blocked me yet?) I gave him my paypal email. Conversation goes like this: C- "Sent." Me- "repeats my email same email correct?" C- "F%@& I sent it to the wrong email. I'll call p
  • 04
    Text - I don't know what to do at this point as l've never encountered a sudden loss of hard work like that. I'm not a drinker at all but that night when faced with that emptiness while trying to get out of depression, I hit the bottle hard. The next day I woke up naked on my bathroom floor in the pitch black and sheepishly checked my PC to see if it really happened. Without any hope at all I started googling this kid's two usernames that I knew of. I scanned the internet for every site that had
  • 05
    Text - A week later I came back and did it all over again, but this time I thought to check his discord profile to see if he had any other profiles linked to it (steam, twitch, etc.) and the genius did. I checked his steam profile and wrote down each of his past usernames that looked unique and wouldn't pull a million results. After hours of scanning each one, I had his name, age (teenager,) city, email, skype, knew he went to chess tournaments as a kid, liked neopets, and found a youtube channe
  • 06
    Text - He ghosted me and emailing him wasn't going to change that. If I was going to get my money back, I needed to contact his parents and I knew this all along. In a last ditch effort I googled his emails again, found his google+ profile, and saw that he had a public photo library (which was discontinued by google very shortly after all this happened.) It had 1 picture. A perfect view of his house, from the street. Street number in view. After some searching without finding much I clicked "Mor
  • 07
    Text - At this point I realize it's March 30th, just two days before April fools and C could probably play this off as some elaborate joke played by his friends so I call my friend off. It was so hard to wait, but we did and we waited long enough that it couldn't be looked at as a joke at all. Two weeks later in a discord call I give my friend the green light and he calls phone #1. The cell. After a little ringing it cuts to voicemail and we decide to try phone #2, the work phone. This time the
  • 08
    Text - significantly longer but also cut to voicemail and the message before the beep confirmed we had the right dad. My friend leaves a message saying "Hello Mr. this is _ with (marketplace name's) collection department. We currently have multiple fradulent activity cases open with your son C, totalling x thousands of dollars (I added up all the reports against him which were posted on the site and it totalled thousands, even talked to a couple people who he targeted.) At the moment we're revie
  • 09
    Text - He was very professional and seemed legit, and even though the dad might listen to it and ignore it we didn't think that was going to happen. It's worth noting that they live in a nice area of a nice state, so there was less of a chance that this would be a financial burden and the parents would likely just want to clear this up. Two days later, while playing video games (yeah I had a problem.) I get a contact request notification. MY BOY C!
  • 10
    Text - He tells me that he's a good person and he wants to give the account back. I check it and he played 10 games and lost each one which deranked and devalued the account (at this point I pretty much knew his parents were standing over his shoulder watching everything that was said. I could've even been speaking to them directly.) So I told him the account devalued, and I either want what he stole from me (the account at a higher rank) or I want $300. He told me he'll give me the account AND
  • 11
    Text - We went through a lot of hoops, trying paypal which he couldn't get to work, a few others and finally got google pay to work after troubleshooting stupid problems which I attriubted to him stalling. It was clear that they were scared of me since I got their info (and regularly called him by his first name throughout the convo as a power move lol) but I assured them I wasn't a bad person and told them to be extra safe of what you upload, especially if you're trying to scam people because w
  • 12
    Text - After he sent the money he asked for confirmation that I received it. I confirmed saying "YOU F** DID IT! SO PROUD OF YOU, C!" and he immediately went offline. I danced up and down the hallway and it was probably embarrasingly bad but I didn't care. I don't think the smile was gone from my face for an hour. It was a month long process and with the help of my friend the money was back. I haven't seen my friend in person since then, but when I do I owe him a top notch steak. He refused when
  • 13
    Text - Instead of trying to resell the account and start back up in the marketplace I abandoned it all and went another way. I'm currently training for the military and in a much better place, but still have a long way to go. A lot was left out of this story but it was a long one. I have screenshots of our conversations and I surely won't ever forget it. TL;DR - I tried selling a video game account to see if I could make a new side hustle and got scammed since I was dumb, inexperienced and decid

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