Is this a scam?

*doof doof doof eebly eebly*

FUUUUCK

Just got a call from my bank that somebody has been scamming my debit card.

Yesterday they tried to buy $1045 in Harry Potter sculptures from the White Wizard Toys in Schaumberg, Illinois. Additionally, they charged me over $90 in protein powder.

Bank closed card and flagged further purchasing, but toys and protein powder have already gone through so account will be drained and I will have to wait for them to refund the money, also will incur overdraft fees.

FUUUUUUUCK

WAAAAAAAIIIT they'll have to refund the overdraft fees as well, you can't be paying for someone else's use/withdrawals.

yes, but only after the purchases post and i get a statement to prove the fraud.

grrrrrr

That seems unnecessarily burdensome for the customer. My bank refunded the money & overdraft charges on "credit", pending their investigation of the fraud. It was available like the next day.

on the bright side, the things they bought are pretty funny.

UH YEAH LEMME GET LIKE 50 OF THEM HARRY POTTERS STATUES AND UH SOME PROTEIN POWDER

my picture of the scammer is, like, a really huge nerd.

HE'S GONNA FIGHT THE HARRY POTTER STATUE

seriously remy sometimes I wonder what the hell you did that your karma is so awful

Alphascript Publishing. They publish wikipedia articles as books, then sell them for £30/$70. Amazon has 46,747 of their books for sale at the moment. AFAIK this isn't illegal but still, its pretty terrible!

Wait til they start doing correspondence courses

Is this like ILX, the book?

"Chapter 8: Hen Fap"

The 'beefs' section of the index would be epic.

not just for the food polls amirite

ilx the book isnt currently available. but have you considered purchasing 'Bluegrass Music: American folk music, Country music, Immigration to the United States, Scotch- Irish American, Immigration, Jazz, Blues, Accompaniment, ... String instrument, Mandolin, Acoustic guitar'? a snip at $84. buy today, don't delay! http://www.amazon.com/Bluegrass-Music-Immigration-Accompaniment-instrument/dp/613026027X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280511131&sr=8-1

have you considered purchasing a foot up your @$%?

great work, sherlock te

gah i wasn't paying close attention

apologies.

This guy is a treat:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.htm

(a cleverer one than the Alphascript "editors", but then this one really seems to think he's doing something inventive and worthwhile, and not just scamming people... much)

I see these scam publishers have moved on from printing Wikipedia articles and have started reprinting out-of-copyright works from Google Books - except I guess the scan images are still copyright Google, so they're using the really bad OCR text instead. Try learning German from this $27.95 reprint of a 1914 book:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dmS6tXf5gsYC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false

While looking for the price on Amazon I found like 20 other 2010 editions of books about German by the same author, some of which had a lot more professional-looking covers. Not sure if I ever bought a book online that I hadn't seen in person or had personally recommended to me, but the days when you might have got a readable book for your money by doing so are definitely over.

After reading the second paragraph on page 1, I'm pretty sure I'm fluent in German now. Dankefj!

incredible pics from the NYT piece on the myanmar scam factories pic.twitter.com/iTD85KAoYO

— punished giorgio (@GMomurder) January 16, 2026