The time I fell for a scam — or was it a social experiment?
Enclosed — 3 ways to avoid falling in my dumb footsteps
How it happened
I was sitting in one of the largest lecture halls at our university, one that seats over a thousand people, waiting for an Introduction to Psychology class to start. From time to time, people come in with flyers for tutoring or MCAT prep companies and scatter them from the second-level balconies.
In fact, from time to time, people come in doing the weirdest things ever:
- an entire marching band marched through our lecture and the prof just stopped, allowed it to happen, and picked up mid-sentence without ever acknowledging the occurrence
- the time a tourist group just entered via one of the second balconies and started taking photos of the lecture and chattering excitedly.
So, on this day that I was about to be scammed, I sat there, five minutes prior to the beginning of class, when someone came in and dropped flyers. On this neon green flyer, it included a QR code, a simple bit.ly link and the tantalizing header
Fill out this survey for a $5 Starbucks gift card!
I picked one up, tucked one into my bag to fill out later.
