Three Bus Tickets
1. Last year Greg and I are gchatting and he says, “I just got a Facebook message from J.” He’s an old friend from high school; neither of us have talked to him in years. ”He’s asking me to buy him a bus ticket. But something doesn’t sound right. This message is erratic, weird. He says the cops have his wallet and also stole his laptop? Also, why is he asking me?” Maybe it’s a real emergency, I suggest. Or something else. “Drugs?” I ask. “I don’t know,” he says. He goes back and forth. I decide I’ll buy the bus ticket, whatever, end this little conversation and everyone’s questions right now, move on from speculating whether our long lost friend is in crisis and actually needs our help, or has hit bottom in a different way. I look up the bus ticket. It costs $178. I can’t afford it. “I can’t either,” Greg says. We don’t buy the ticket. We don’t know what happens.
Sometimes I think, this is either the best excuse for having an emergency credit card—I would have bought him that ticket—or the the worst (I would have bought him that ticket).
2. A friend gchats me from her office across town. “Can I buy a bus ticket with your debit card?” she asks. “Yes,” I say. “I have the cash to pay you, but it’s just not in my account.” I buy her the bus ticket. It’s $20. Later, we meet up and hang out, and she tries to hand me a twenty. I try to refuse. “$20 is whatever,” I say. “Take the money,” she says. She stuffs it in my purse and it stays there.
3. This morning my bank account is at $0. A check is in the mail, and some cash is in my wallet, but that doesn’t change the fact that my bank account is zero. I gchat Lauren and ask, “Can I ask you for a favor?” I type “embarrassing favor” then erase “embarrassing,” then put it back in. “Can I ask you for an embarrassing favor? Can you buy me a bus ticket from NYC to DC?” The bus ticket is $16. ” Yes I can do that,” she says, and she does. I get the email confirmation and type back, “I am forever in your debt.” “Not forever,” she types back. “Just $16 worth.”
Whoa, what kind of cross-country bus ticket is $178? I hope your friend is okay.
The first one was probably a scam. It happened to me a few years ago where the hackers took over my email account and then used that to access my Facebook account. They opened up chat windows with anyone online and said that I had been robbed, and that I didn’t have access to my computer or my phone and I needed money right away to get “home”. It included a bunch of details that sounded fishy, so thankfully no one sent money, but I know a lot of people who have been on the receiving end of that scam (both as the ones being hacked and as the ones getting requests for money).
I think it’s really important in cases like this to get in some sort of non-electronic contact with a person before sending more than $20 someones way.
@Sue Anne Reed@facebook Yeah, just came here to say this! Did you ever hear from this person again? The “I’m stranded in a strange city and have lost my wallet/passport and need money” is a classic scam people do when they get access to someone’s email address book, though I’ve never heard of it happening over chat before.
@Sue Anne Reed@facebook That happened to the old head of my study abroad program last year. And his email address book has people from all over the world, many of whom are probably kind of old, so they probably got a good haul. And one kid in last year’s ESL-teaching program in France wrote on Facebook that it happened to him and some of his older relatives sent thousands of dollars.
Semi-relatedly, if someone comes up to you in a random part of a big city and asks for 65 cents to take a bus to another state, they’re probably also lying.
@jfruh Yes, I got an email like this from my aunt. Totally fake.
@Sue Anne Reed@facebook Same thing happened to my dad from an acquaintance of his, while my dad was on the phone to me. The story was that the acquaintance had gotten mugged at gunpoint in London and I was immediately like IT’S A SCAM, NO ONE HAS GUNS IN LONDON.
I love your honesty, Logan, because it always takes your writing to interesting places. It doesn’t always take the comment section to interesting places, what will all the armchair analysis.
But I can relate to the point (illustrated in the last two bus ticket stories) about how the same amount of money holds different values at different points in your life, even if those points aren’t spaced that far apart.
If you have a little time (it’s a long story), James Fallows of The Atlantic lays out the execution and consequences of a similar-to-No.-1-sounding but Gmail-related hacking scam here.
My friend was living in Hawaii and was in a pretty bad place (couch surfing, medical problems, shitty boyfried, no job) and another friend and I payed for her plane ticket home. That is definitely the best $350 I ever spent.
I hardly ever carry cash, but was heading from Maine to NYC and was waiting for a train in Boston when I guy asked me for $6 to help him get a ticket home. I actually had some cash on me so I handed to it him, figuring I didn’t care what he did with it. He walked over to the counter and bought a ticket! I guess you never know.
These are my two ticket stories.