This is a story about faith in humanity.

When I was at the train station in Germany, a middle-aged woman came to me to ask me for a favor. She said, that it is quite embarrassing for her, but she lost her ticket for the train station and she needs to pick up her daughter at the age of 3 in a different city and if I could lend her some money to by the new ticket for the trip forth and back.

• She has a broken phone which does not work very well and does not have any money with her.
• I asked if she could send me the money through paypal, she does not have it.
• I asked her, if she can transfer the money to me by IBAN.
• She said yes, I did send her my IBAN through Whatsapp after I received her phone number.
• I asked her to transfer the money now, then I can give her the cash
• She does not have online banking but will do so tomorrow
• I said, that I won’t do it then
• She looked sad - she was so close
• I said, that I would need a photo of an ID to do this
• She thought and said “Oh okay, I only have my passport with me”
• I agreed, took a photo, gave her the cash and had to take my train

Thoughts about the incident

In the train I thought about the situation and found a few things very weird:

1. Why did she ask me, like 15 minutes before my train arrived - thats just enough time to put me into time pressure, so that I became fuzzy and did not have enough time to think very clear
2. The passport might be fake due to me taking a picture in the hurry, a german passport does not have the full housing address given but only the authority
3. Her former housing on the passport was given as “Keine Wohnung in Deutschland” - so she might have been homeless or living somewhere else?
4. Why did she leave her child in another city which she has to pick up at 8pm?
5. She did ask at a long-distance station track, not on the track of the train she would need to take. On her track, people who have time to solve the issue with her might be available, while on my track only people with a schedule are available.

Conclusion

So I came to the conclusion that:

1. I probably just got scammend
2. She probably needs the money much more urgent than I do
3. Weird that the only way to survive when being broke and at the lowest, is to lie
4. I always thought that these things would not happen to me
5. I do not really know what I would do with the picture of the passport and the information that I gave her money - like who would believe me? - if the passport is even real
6. I was convinced that my faith in humanity was again destroyed for a few weeks due to this incident. It is not about the money but about the action
7. It is very bad, because such a situation could happen to me too, so I would have liked, if people would help me then, too. But people are conditioned by bad actors to not help people in need anymore

Surprise

But to my surprise things changed very much. After arriving at my target train station, I called her by phone after I did send her a whatsapp. She picked up - said that she is in the train and does not forget me and will do the transfer when she arrives home. She also answered my Whatsapp with something similar. Great, I now have text evidence, that she ows me the money and knows about this. Not something a scammer would do, right?

She said to do the transfer (by putting a letter to the bank, which probably has additional costs due to the banking system being fucked up). The money never came. She said to do it a few times though and did always answer, but then after months the number was not active anymore.

I got over this eventually a few months later though, after I saw that there is no way to get the money back anymore.

Final words

This story did not turn out very well for me, as it sets an incentive for people to lie, as you get reward for it. However, I think that this person is somewhat in need and it does not feel like having money lost to

I would have liked if this would have worked out, but unfortunately, reality is no movie so things are often not working out well.

In hindsight, I am very happy that this was not a huge amount of money.

Still, I want to mention that I should never have done this. This is somewhat similar to how scams on the internet happen. And in a bad or rushed situation anything can happen to anyone. Even Troy Hunt can get phished. And only give things you can bear losing.