enbean

Person on screen: needs a couple pats of butter, a splash of olive oil, simmered on low with a bay leaf and a cinnamon stick. What?! You never seen a boy who knows his way around the kitchen? 

Yeah my mom always wanted a little girl but she got stuck with me instead. That wasn’t gonna stop her though so all my friends were opening up nerf guns and bmx bikes on their birthday, I was getting crockpots. 

(scene changes to the person dressed in a nice black suit jacket, bright pink dress shirt, and black tie) Yeah laugh it up! Take a picture while you’re at it 'cause this is the last time you’ll ever see me in a suit! How do boys wear these things??

Stratt: "hmm what do you think dr grace?"

Grace: wow what a crazy plan that would take an absurd amount of power to accomplish and have far-reaching impacts "yeah it's feasible, i'd go with it"

Stratt: "alright, you heard him, do it"

Everyone from the crew: you do get that this is secret information only a handful of people will know, right?

For me today, those circumstances were: Several days of being underslept. Over-stressed. Forgot to take my ADHD meds this morning. Already dealing with the harried mental state of day-before-travel stress. A personal panic trigger of missing appointments because I forgot about them.

We all know by now that the IRS will not call you on the phone. The jury duty people also will not call you on the phone, and this was the crucial piece of information that I did not have cold hard confirmation of today. Here is what happened, so that you can be equipped in case these fuckers call you:

Man with an American accent tells me he's from my city's courthouse. He tells me I missed jury duty summons yesterday and that now I'm in Trouble for contempt of court and failure to appear for jury duty. I protested that I hadn't gotten a notification for jury duty, he talked over me and said scary things about getting law enforcement involved unless I went to pay some fines and talk to the judge Right Now Today. He told me that I legally wasn't allowed to hang up the phone or put it on mute. He told me that I was under a "gag order" and I couldn't tell anyone about this except law enforcement or immediate family members. He already knew my address. He had official-sounding case numbers which he made me write down and repeat back to him. He had official addresses of where I needed to go and what I needed to do: Take the cash for my "fines" to a kiosk where I would pay them and receive a "voucher" that i would then take to the courthouse where I would supposedly speak to a judge. He told me again that if I hung up the phone before I got to the courthouse, it would be taken as obstruction or failure to comply or intent to flee and he would notify the police. He told me that if I went to sort it out with the judge, it might be waived and my money would be refunded.

I have not gotten jury duty summons for a WHILE -- since before the pandemic -- and I had been idly thinking recently that maybe I was due for one. So I heard all this and my panic button about Forgetting/Missing An Appointment got hit dead-on.

I panicked, I was upset and frantic, I was not thinking clearly. This is how they fucking get you.

Honestly, thank god he wanted me to take cash to a different location instead of giving him any financial information over the phone. Thank GOD for that, because it gave my nervous system 30 minutes or so to calm down and my higher brain functions to come back online so that I could notice that there were simply too many red flags in one interaction. I did go to my bank, I did withdraw quite a lot of money in cash.

The address he gave me to go to next was for a gas station. When I expressed confusion, the scammer had smooth explanations, and before I'd even parked, he'd texted me some glossy "official" looking infographics on how to use the kiosk and why the """government""" had started doing payments this way (supposedly a COVID measure, and because the funds were 'safer' or something). The kiosk, these infographic images said, was run by a company called BTC Tech, which they claimed was "Bailing Institute & Technologies". You will notice that that does not match the acronym. The infographic was full of grammatical errors, and thank god he had me sit there in my car and read the whole thing out loud "to make sure i understood it" so that I could hear myself vocally trip over every single one of those grammatical errors and think "Wow, this is weird, it wasn't proofread?"

He sent me a QR code for the ""kiosk"" which had a familiar logo on it. He had persistently asked me for my ETA to the next location, and he was pressuring me to get out of the car and go inside to the kiosk, and it was at this point that I started lying and said, "Sure, hang on one second, i have a pebble in my shoe or something I need to fix first" while I was googling "Bitcoin logo" to verify.

Didn't really need to verify because when I went inside, the only "kiosk" looking thing was an ATM looking thing that had "BITCOIN" written on it in very loud letters. Which brings us to one of two admittedly hilarious interactions, wherein i was standing there in front of the fucking bitcoin machine with my eyes narrowed going, "This is for Bitcoin" several times while he said "No no no no it's not, it's not bitcoin, it's BTC tech" and I kept saying "Well but it says Bitcoin on it in big letters." "No no, it's just a multi-currency system, it's for the courthouse, you have to get the voucher." "Ok but it's fucking BITCOIN, this feels like a scam, I don't think the government uses BITCOIN."

I walked out. I went back to my car. I told him that I wasn't comfortable, and that I needed to call the courthouse to verify with them what the charges were, or I needed to go in person to the courthouse to check what was up. He told me if I hung up, I'd be arrested, and if I stepped foot on government property, I'd be arrested.

It was at this point that I utilized a weapon which in many cases is very dangerous and unethical to use but hey, it's perfect for situations like this: White Lady* Tears. This is exactly the situation they're MEANT for -- buying yourself time to think when a man is strongarming you into meek obedience and fear. (* I am nonbinary but he didn't need to know that.)

Anyway I pretended to cry and told him i felt nauseous and that i was going to be sick and i was just uwu so fwightened and upset and uwu uwu uwu sob sob i felt like he was getting mad at me and it was so scawy oh woe oh no -- while this happened he texted me an arrest warrant that had one of my old roommates' names on it instead of mine, but that EPIC FUMBLE didn't even matter because the whole time I am frantically googling on my phone "jury duty scam" and finding a Reddit page from a guy who posted about the exact same thing happening to him.

I hung up. I called the courthouse, got patched through to the jury pool department, and as soon as the guy picked up, I said, "Hi, my name is Alex, I just got a call saying that I missed jury duty--" and before I could even finish the sentence, the guy said, "That was a scam, we will NEVER call you." I said thank god thank god oh fuck thank god, which brings me to the second hilarious moment of this escapade, where the jury duty guy cheerfully said, "But if you have a couple thousand dollars on you, you can come over and give them to me if you want!" which did make me burst out laughing. Thank you, jury duty guy, for that much-needed moment of levity. I hope you're having a good day.

You are not immune to social engineering. I am 36 years old, highly intelligent, educated, and VERY tech-savvy, and those fuckers STILL caught me at just the right moment and with just the right hook that it triggered panic and desperation and shame and guilt and overrode my critical thinking skills for a solid 30 minutes. If it happened to me, it could happen to you. BE FUCKING VIGILANT. THE IRS WILL NEVER CALL YOU, AND JURY DUTY WILL NEVER CALL YOU.

In hindsight, I'm actually glad that it played out the way it did. For one thing, as a life lesson, that was a pretty cheap one -- all that it cost me was about an hour of my life (including the time it took to go back to the bank and deposit the money I'd withdrawn, gossip extensively to the bank teller about what happened, and get home) and some grey hairs.

For another thing, that fucker spent all that time on the phone with me and didn't get my money. I snatched his smug asshole victory right out of his mouth at the last second and wasted his time -- time that he otherwise ould have spent scamming someone who might not have gotten over their panic in time.

I actually wish that I'd kept him on the phone longer, tbh. If I'd been less rattled, I bet I could have strung him along for another hour or two. Better he spend it with me than with someone else.

The scammers even had a setup where they "transferred" the call around. It was impressive, and they were prepared for questions about badge numbers, supervisor names, etc.

In hindsight, so much about the call was absurd -- that we were under surveillance, an arrest would automatically happen if we set foot in the police department, the need to go to a "self-serve bail kiosk", the refusal to allow anyone else on the line (the scammers did NOT want my partner to tell me anything).

I have read about this scam a million times.

But in the moment, it was incredibly intense. I only got a taste of it, too, when my partner passed me the phone. Even if you sense a red flag, you are not given a moment to examine it. So many scammer tactics are straight out of the abuser handbook: high urgency, authoritative voice, a barrage of instructions to follow. They want you scared and confused.

Even if you know, "the cops don't call", resisting this sort of thing takes practice!

I used to talk to a lot of cops in my old job, which is what helped me push back -- the minute I chastised the "officer" for being so jargon-heavy and not talking like a real person (something I did often at that old job), I was able to snap out of the scammer's spell and do a sanity check.

But if I had been a little poorer, a little more depressed, or things timed closer to my old legal troubles w/forgotten citations, I may have fallen for it.

I am with OP: You are not immune to social engineering. In fact, the more you think you are immune, the more you are likely suspectible.

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

how measurements work in canada (ie/ badly)