With the rise of AI, scams are getting more creative every day. It is easier than ever to trick someone, which is why the old saying still rings true: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But just because new scams exist does not mean the old ones have disappeared. In fact, some of them keep resurfacing, as one New York Redditor recently experienced. A user going by Severe_Fun_6773 shared a post on r/newyork describing how they were stopped on the street by a driver trying to pull the infamous “ring scam.” The Redditor noticed a woman and a boy sitting in the backseat, which already raised suspicion. Then the driver leaned over and offered two gold rings, insisting they should take them. “He showed me two rings and told me take them. The rings looked like total garbage,” the Redditor wrote.
It was not the first time they had encountered this kind of scam. Recognizing the setup immediately, the Redditor confronted the man, saying they had already seen him exposed on Facebook and TikTok. They even tried to record his license plate, only to discover the car did not have one.
After the encounter, the Redditor uploaded their video to r/newyork, explaining that they had first heard about the ring scam back in the early 2000s. For it to still be around decades later, they reasoned, it must actually work on some people.
Commenters on the New York subreddit had mixed reactions. Some were confused, asking how the scam was supposed to work. Another user explained it clearly: “They want cash. Supposedly, as collateral, the ring is worth thousands. He only needs $100 for gas or milk for the baby. The only thing is, the ring is worthless. That is the scam.”
Others were more blunt in their reactions. “These mfs are so shameless,” one person wrote, shocked at how brazen the setup was in broad daylight. Another chimed in with their own story, confirming that this is not an isolated scheme.
One Redditor recalled a similar encounter from last summer. According to their post, an Arab man pulled up with a woman in the passenger seat, claiming he was out of gas and needed money to reach a station uptown. The situation immediately felt off, and when they hesitated, the man began quoting Islamic verses to guilt-trip them. The Redditor found this especially unsettling since the scammer somehow knew they were Muslim.
The man then tried to sweeten the deal by offering his ring in exchange for a few hundred dollars, but the Redditor walked away before falling into the trap. Looking back, they described it as “dodging a bullet” and noted that the man matched the description of others running the same scam in New York.
