Woman Gets Wild Email From Man Who Hacked Her Credit Card: ‘Thank You’

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A woman who had her credit-card details stolen online was left stunned after receiving a jaw-dropping request from her alleged scammer.

Online scams affect a huge number of people in the U.S. every year. Americans lost as much as $10.3 billion to a variety of internet scams in 2022 alone, according to FBI estimates.

But, while fraud remains commonplace in the age of the internet, it’s rare for a scammer to return to the scene of the crime. What’s even rarer still is for them to get in touch with the very person they defrauded to begin with.

Screenshot of the email from the alleged scammer to the woman. The man had his flight canceled and was not happy about it, so he emailed the woman he is said to have scammed.
u/AshesfallforAshton

Yet, that’s exactly what allegedly happened to one Reddit user posting under the handle u/AshesfallforAshton. Though she declined to be named, u/AshesfallforAshton told Newsweek that she is a 29-year-old woman from Denver who works in tech. Recently, she discovered that she had been scammed.

It all started when she received alerts on her phone notifying her of purchases from Priceline and Delta Airlines. “I called my bank within 10 minutes and canceled the card,” she said. Even then, the unknown scammer was trying to make more purchases with money spent on “Door dash, tickets to a Dino museum and some medieval site.”

Though u/AshesfallforAshton was able to stop any additional spending and recoup the money she had lost, she soon discovered another flight had been purchased from Detroit to Raleigh in North Carolina.

Once again, the poster took immediate action. “I realized they used my Gmail account to book the tickets. I signed into the Priceline account they created by clicking ‘login with Google,'” u/AshesfallforAshton said.

“I called my bank and told them I had the guy’s name and that I could cancel the flight for no charge, and the bank told me to cancel it.”

A few more days passed, and then something extraordinary happened; she received an email from her alleged scammer. “Why was my flight canceled?” the message read. “Could you please respond? I have a family event to attend.”

Understandably, u/AshesfallforAshton couldn’t believe what she was reading. “I thought it was hilarious and I immediately called my two friends and we had a good laugh about what the hell is wrong with this guy,” she said.

“I was just shocked and started laughing immediately. I didn’t reply. Part of me thought that it was part of a bigger scam. Like if I replied he’d get my IP address or something else.”

However, her dad was less amused. “He was pretty freaked out,” she said. “He didn’t find it funny at the time. He thought that only someone really dangerous would have the gumption to email asking that and told me to call the police. So I did.”

Despite filing a police report, u/AshesfallforAshton said she “gave up” trying to press formal charges, having been given the runaround by the authorities.

She didn’t want to let things lie entirely, though, so opted instead to share a screenshot of the email her suspected scammer sent her to Reddit. “I just wanted to see if anyone else found it as ridiculous as I did,” she said.

The answer was a resounding yes, with the resulting post racking up over 159,000 upvotes on Reddit and a deluge of comments from similarly stunned social-media users.

Some wrote that the emailer may not necessarily be the scammer. “I had something like this happen to me a few years ago,” one wrote. “The agent from the airline told me ‘it happens all the time and the person that emailed you could have gotten scammed as well’ as a third party is involved.”

Others were less convinced. “This guy is one of the stupidest criminals I’ve ever seen,” one user posted, with another commenting “This is a real life episode of Seinfeld.”

Elsewhere, one Reddit user was torn as to whether the scammer in the post was “the dumbest criminal or a savage” but appreciated the warning. “I had never heard about these kinds of scams before, thank you for enlightening me and everybody else,” they wrote.

Do you have a monetary dilemma? Let us know via [email protected]. We can ask experts for advice, and your story could be featured on Newsweek.

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