u/LethisXia

I always thought scams were supposed to be obvious, but Germany (or EU) really hits different.

My friend (not from Germany but can speak pretty fluent German) opened a hair salon here a few months ago and is still ironing out the usual mountain of legal stuff. So, when she got a call from "Google" claiming they legally have to check the data every 2 years due to EU regulations asking her a bit about her business data at Google, she continued talking. It sounded somehow typically EU and legally plausible that she just went with it.

The caller was super professional, asking about her business hours and checking if her reviews were appearing correctly. Then he says, "I’m going to start a recording now just to get your legal allowance to keep the linking to the website up."

He reads out her name and the salon's name and information on her business profile. She says "Yes. Yes. Yes..."

Then, suddenly, he switches to 2x speed and mumbles something about a totally unrelated hosting company and an €89/year contract for two years. She caught it at the last second, shouted "No, I'm not agreeing to a contract" he tried to respond by "but we talked about your linking and keeping it up" so she responded something like "no you said you'd be calling from Google and not from any other company" and he immediately hung up.

In hindsight of course she got kinda suspicious since Google wouldn't normally call on the phone (she had to do a Google business verification check but it was through Google meet) but the guy was really good in trying to get your trust...

Of course I've seen this kind of scam before in other places, but bringing EU regulations in as a "trust-signal" is pretty good (in a scammy way of course), since it feels so far removed and "out-of-reach" for regular folks, but somehow also very... German 🤷‍♂️

Nach einem nächtlichen Polizeieinsatz herrscht am Montagmorgen Chaos im Frankfurter Bahnverkehr. Mehrere S-Bahn-Linien sind betroffen. Der Hintergrund des Einsatzes ist noch unklar.

Eine gute Freundin von mir zieht bald aus den USA zu uns (und nope, nicht zur Army, ganz normaler Job in der Gegend). Wir haben gestern telefoniert und sie hat mich gefragt, was so die absoluten „ungeschriebenen Gesetze“ sind.. also die Dinge, die in keinem Reiseführer stehen, die man aber unbedingt wissen muss, um hier entspannt klarzukommen (oder um sich nicht direkt unbeliebt zu machen).

Ehrlich gesagt stand ich total auf dem Schlauch 🤦. Kann hier jemand helfen?