It appears plenty of Facebook users are being pranked by a story about a cunning “criminal” and a con concerning a washing machine that almost certainly didn’t happen, this week.
The story (or rather, the warning) goes like this.
WARNING. This guy was supposed to buy our washing machine for £150. He wanted to see it working first, and asked if he could do a load of laundry. After he finished, he said “let me go get the money”, got in his car, and drove away with his clean clothes.
Certainly a fiendish scheme and an effective way to get some free laundry done. But is the story actually true?
In reality, probably not.
It appears the first instance of this story appeared on a Facebook selling group in Brighton in the UK (that’s the post above.) However, the story seemed rather dubious from the onset, especially since it is unclear why someone would even bother executing such a pointless scam – public launderettes are hardly expensive and the time and petrol presumably needed to carry out such a scheme would hardly have made it worth the bother.
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The story seemed extra suspicious when the photo of the “washing machine conman” actually turned out to be one of the original posters Facebook friends.
Since then a significant number of photos of various people have been attributed to the same fictitious story, often posted on public Facebook groups that centre around buying and selling. In reality it seems to have morphed into some kind of Internet-jokey meme, with hundreds of Facebook users attaching photos of their own friends to the story and posting them in various groups on the social networking website.
It seems that despite the popularity of this story, the scheme actually never took place at all. It’s just a joke that seems to have gone extremely viral across the website.
Another reason to take things you see on Facebook with a pinch of detergent. Sorry, salt. We mean salt.
