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Every few days there is an new question formatted:

This person/friend/long-lost-distant-relative/shady-website asked for my bank/credit-card password that they have no reason for. Are they trying to steal from me?

They all boil down to here is a list of how I am getting scammed, but I would like some free money. Is this a scam?

Some of these get down voted heavily, but some others get quite a few upvotes (see the recent one below with 52 upvotes in 4 days).

I believe these add no value, and dilute the quality of questions. Due to the similarities is it appropriate to flag these as "duplicates"? Is there a more appropriate flag to use?

The most recent one: Is this person wanting to pay my credit card trying to defraud me? 16,000 views, 52 upvotes in four days. This seems to be fishing for answers and looks like a reddit post fishing for gold.

Here are a few others (some have been marked as duplicate):

Is this person doing illegal money transfers?
Bank account set up for me
Is This A Scam? Woman added me on LinkedIn first, then e-mailed offering me millions of dollars
About receiving funds from someone else's account from overseas bank
Can a foreign bank manager name me as the kin of a deceased customer if I don't know the person?
A friend wants to use my account for a wire transfer. Is this a scam or is it legitimate?
Is this "approved" online loan a scam? I was asked for my user name and password

Not all scam questions are bad, but these questions all appear to be the same to me, and add no value to this stackexchange.

What do people think?

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    The "pay my credit card" question got into HNQ. That's why it got upvoted so highly since anyone who comes from other sites only gets upvote privilege due to association bonus (+100), but not enough to downvote. Also, maybe it's only my perception, but yes, scam questions usually get into HNQ and thus, the skewed voting happens.
    – Andrew T.
    Aug 28, 2017 at 5:37

2 Answers 2

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Even if we mark these and duplicate and close; we generally don't delete such questions or answers.

Most are scam questions and simple answer is to stay away from these. There are some variations or some questions trying to understand specifics of a particular technique otherwise they are all same.

In my view it makes sense to keep them open as quite a few don't realize the variations of the scam techniques and are looking if a specific method is indeed scam.

The questions [and the answers as well] do attract quite a bit of upvotes which at times doesn't sound right. I guess from a stackexchange point of view, it is not what one feels as important question, but what the community feels is important. There are good number of great questions that have votes in single digits, and most scam questions/answers have vote in 3 digits ... so to an extent it looks incorrect, but I guess that is the nature of community who feel these questions are more relevant.

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The duplicate questions will always be an issue. Today, I closed

IRS Scammer-Do I need to contact police or lawyer?

as a dup of

I gave a scammer my telephone number, address, and name. How bad is it?

given that the question contained "I accidentally told them my first and last name and zip code" and the linked "I gave a scammer my telephone number, address, and name."

Of course, the OP pushed back "not a duplicate in my opinion because I did not give my full address and only zip code." It's rare that a dup poster will ever just say thanks and be happy. I'm leaning towards embracing the dups, and only closing those that are identically the same.

The "someone I really don't know" questions can probably be closed as soon as they arise, even though there will be objection.

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