SCAM ALERT!!! Family Sharing Diamond membership scam!!
TLDR, I (along with 2 others) got scammed, describing here so that nobody else does.
Full story:
After losing 150 rating points in bullet straight within an hour, I somehow stumbled upn the idea of Diamond membership on chess com and reached Reddit posts where people were apparently sharing Family memberships.
The guy said one other peson has contacted him, and we 3 can do this. I agreed and "the other person" bought it and asked my userid; for some reason my account was not getting added after all efforts, and they started making me feel guilty that they had bought it because of me and sort of insinuated me to post to collect more members; which I did. And 2 more innocent people joined because of my post and they paid.
Initially I was very busy in figuring out the problems with my chess com account and meanwhile the rushed the 2 real people into paying quicklu. Eventually it did cross my mind that the 7 day trial does not require you to pay, and that's how scammers were able to give diamond membership to the 2 innocent people and hence gain their trust and the money; now I am sure it will get cancelled in 7 days and they have (the 2 scammers) already stopped replying. Some digging brought out that both those people are the same person.
So, as much as I am annoyed; I want to make everyone aware that please be careful of this scam. I am pretty sure nothing coult be done as they were UPI payments, but anyone has any leads please let me know.
EDIT: In a very unexpected turn of events, the person(s) returned the money after a certain amount rough intimidation. At this point it is unclear if they were scammers 100%, so I won't call them that unless can be proved with absolute surety. However since everything around the whole fiasco had a fishy vibe, I believe we did the right thing, and would insist everyone to be wary of such scenarios.
EDIT 2 Conclusion:
Experienced a rare but insightful side of internet today; as previously discussed in the post a very suspicious looking scneario was actually completly uncomplicated. In the whim of the moment, I connected too many doubts and hallucinated that these 2 individuls were scammers, while they were completey guileless individuals. Not only I misjudged them, I had to resort to a very forbidding mannerism of talking, which was simply uncalled for and might have left a sense lingering resentment on the idividulas. Hence, I ernestly apologize for interpretting too much out of suspicion causing undue distress and hope we all can get over it.