It’s very interesting to me: are there people among those present here who have ever received any amount from strangers just like that? It's quite simple like that. The stranger asked for some small service and, in return, promised a large profit. For some reason, even with such numerous answers, it seems to me that free money is not available to anyone. Or rather, money always has a price, but the one who expects to get it very easily pays for it out of his own pocket and gets a very unpleasant experience.
So why do people go for it? OP, what's wrong with you? Were you at the time of the transfer of money in some kind of disorder, drunk, on drugs, or under hypnosis? Where was your mind at that moment?
It can be crazy how gullible people can be, and part of the issue is that several folks engage with obvious scams because they have a kind of belief that they are capable of outsmarting the scammer (so they engage); however, they are so much driven by the "possibility" that it could be true. Really what are the odds that something like this could be true? It's likely not even 1%, but instead perhaps 1/10k.. however, the gullible person places higher odds.. that it could be true.. maybe they know it is not very likely but they place odds of 20% or 30% or some other outrageously high amount.. maybe it is true? Or maybe they start to convince themselves that it could be 50/50.. I don't think that it is true, but it could be. So they get trapped into a small amount.. such as $300.. and then they start to get motivated to get their $300 back.. and the whole thing seems ridiculous to any of us who have either thought through the scenario or seen others who have been tricked by such scenarios.
I will concede that it is not necessarily obvious that the situation is a scam, because the scammers play on the fact that people are usually honest. When you meet people on the street and they give you some kind of advice or tell you about some thing that is going on in the world, the vast majority of times, they are not lying to you.. so then when we meet "nice people" on the interwebs, we start to consider that they are like people whom we have met in the real world.. generally nice people.. blah blah blah..
And really, it is eye rolling because sometimes relatively smart people can be tricked into believing the stories that they are told, and then perhaps a bit of their desperation and/or greed and/or willingness to gamble kicks in.. .. anyhow, it is crazy. but at the same time, we do see people who are trapped into these kinds of situations, and even with OP, any of us can see in the way that he frames the matter, he wants to be scammed.. He wants to believe.. that's part of the reason that he wrote the OP in the first place.. I mean if we can take him at his word that this really happened to him, and I don't really have any reason to believe that he made it up.. it sounds like something that people do.. especially if they have not been presented with similar scenarios.. whether the Nigerian Prince situation or some other variation of that kind of story to suck in the gullible to send money or to make a small deposit and it goes on and escalates more and more and more, and sometimes people loose hundreds of thousands of dollars because they are trying to get back their investment, so even if they might get some payoffs from time to time, the scammer keeps increasing the amount required and sometimes might send somethings back or even some things that appear to be valuable.. oh and another thing is that they might give the contact information of the gullible one to their friend.. so that such gullible one can be scammed by others too.. .
you might be able to scam the scammer to get yours back.
Yeah some of the gullible people do think that they can scam the scammer.. but most of the time, they cannot... hahahaha a kind of false sense of competence... You notice OP said that he was just trying to see what the scammer was going to say, and that he really did not believe the scammer, but at the same time he got scammed already and seems like a very good target to continue to be scammed because he wants to believe and he is either greedy or desperate... thinks that he can get freebies.. or that maybe he might get lucky..
right.