Royal Membership Cards: the most bizarre Facebook scam of 2024
Everyone thinks that scams only work on stupid people until they work on them. Then, it turns out, they reassess. However, there are a few that really do push the boundaries of people’s understanding, and one of them came from the cesspit of boomer memes, Facebook, in 2024.
The screenshots really are hilarious on the surface. A Facebook accounting purporting to be that of King Charles himself introduces the concept of “Royal Membership Cards”, a scheme that seems to be offering all the benefits of being a scion of the House of Windsor without any of the pesky responsibilities.
You just hand over your cash and suddenly, you might as well move into Buckingham Palace itself. However, you really do have to wonder who would read the small print here and think “this seems legit!”
First off, the Facebook post seems to imply that it’s written by Charlie himself. One would imagine that he has underlings to do that sort of thing himself, but apparently not. Although one hopes that this was a royal intern writing as Big Charlie, because if not, the post is asking people to believe the King of England himself can’t spell his own name – the card at its supposed regular membership “offers the chance to meet with the king chaharles”.
One heck of a start, but it gets worse. The regular membership apparently entitles you to three all-expenses-paid meetings with Charlie-Boy a year, which apparently comes with dinner with the king himself and “all his children together in the palace”. If that wasn’t enough, it comes with a bunch of King Charles merch and (somewhat inexplicably) not one, but two iPhone 14 Pro Maxes.
However, that’s just the entry point. For the VIP experience, you’ll also get “health insurance”, a strange thing to advertise in a country with the NHS, but go off, I guess. Along with receiving “minimum wage from the royal house of England”. Which is apparently a different thing from the “Financial assistance” it also advertises. Somehow. You also get limitless, all-expenses-paid flights to visit the King in London.
This wasn’t a joke either. Counter Fraud Investigators approached the Facebook account and were sent a number of application forms that quoted fees in the thousands for the privilege. Which begs a much bigger question about the very concept of falling for scams in the first place.
It’s very easy to be smug about this and joke about how stupid you have to be to fall for this stuff, but the truth is, people do. Whether it’s out of desperation, or a compromised mental state or, yeah, being a bit thick, real-life people get taken for their life savings by stuff that looks this patently fake every day.
No one’s going to feel worse about the situation than they will, so you’ve really got to ask what you’re achieving by pointing and laughing at someone who lost everything due to an admittedly very stupid mistake. Something that I’m sure the people laughing have never made in their life, and if (with the way that AI seems to be going at the moment, maybe that should be when) it happens to them, I suppose the only thing to do is treat them with the same empathy and kindness they treated others with, right?
