|
|
Standard Membership
|
Posted:Feb 9, 2019 7:33 pm
Last Updated:Dec 14, 2020 7:50 pm 14614 Views
|
There it is. I cannot see others profile anymore. Description and pictures: good bye. I encountered this restriction only on sites that generally suck.
No more messaging for me. Not even the ongoing messaging is available. Well, that truly sucks.
|
|
|
3
Comments
|
|
Scams
|
Posted:Jan 31, 2019 11:23 am
Last Updated:Feb 7, 2019 11:16 am 21238 Views
|
Well, I posted this as a response to another blog but it is stuck in review by the blog owner, so why not repeating it here with some additional thoughts.
One of the first things I tried to make very clear to my about online safety is that it is very hard to know who is on the other end of the communication. This is true even when we think that we know who we are in conversation: our friends and relatives. It is always possible that it is someone else is doing the talking. As an example of this I asked them to type some responses to a friend of mine while I was driving. In this case, yes, the messages ultimately came from me, but it was a living and illustrative example for my sons. It actually led to some good fun when I asked them to start writing as they would. There was of course some confusion for a short time and a lot of laughter.
But I hope you get the point.
I am learning Mandarin and can teach English , so one of the resources I use is HelloTalk, an app that allows people to connect and mutually help each other in their language learning journey. It is sort of like WeChat but the moments are open to everyone and it has some added features that help with learning the languages, like highlighted correction or the transliteration of the Chinese characters. It has voice and video calls, voice messages, too. In fact it can transcribe the voice messages to help with the understanding. There are language lessons as well.
In any case, regularly I would be contacted by someone whose profile is purportedly of a woman (usually around 30) and fairly quickly asks to switch to WeChat. I usually am suspicious of these as so far only one of them provided a somewhat reasonable explanation: that the free account on HelloTalk allows you to use the translation feature only a set number of times per day.
I usually let us switch to WeChat because I want to see where the scam goes: In one case I was really glad because I found the best and sort of funniest profile hoaxes: these two profiles were posting the same, highly edited pictures.
You know there are apps that edit the pictures on the fly, right? Make the chin smaller, the eyes bigger, color the brows, the hair, the eyes, etc., etc.
One such app is B-612 another one is Beauty Face, a third one is Face-u...
Actually I find the B-612's name such an affront as it is the name of the imaginary asteroid where the little prince comes from in Antoine De Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, which is all about truthfulness and heartfelt love for the other.
So both accounts posted the same pics. When I shared this experience with a Chinese friend she was laughing and telling me that it originates from a relatively legit market that developed from the of some men. Men who left for the cities to work were often expected to find a wife while being away so the relatives were pressuring them by asking whether they had a girlfriend, yet. Some found a way to calm their relatives by paying young women for pictures in ordinary life situations: in the kitchen, taking a walk, etc. which they could then post and say: here is my girlfriend, so shut up already and leave me in peace.
So far no one asked for money and all these people were supposed to be very wealthy. Who knows.
The closest I got to be asked for money was when a young woman said she would teach me how to trade Bitcoins. She had me install a trading app and walked me through how to create a demo account. (I did tell her that I had no money to invest.) She would regularly tell me when her "teacher" gave the signal to trade. Either to buy or to sell. It was great. I could make thousands of demo (imaginary) dollars in a few minutes each day. If I could really deposit say $5000 I could make a ton of money. Right?
I was trying to figure out where the catch was... Well, the app is legit. The brokerage she had me set up with... who knows.
My hunch is that eventually I would have been on the losing side of the transaction by feeding the opposite of the trading signal. The more patsies put in their few thousand dollars the more they can make on the right side of the trade.
Of course I do not know this. It is just a theory. But I was left thinking because she had no good explanation why she would be so to teach me and to share these trading signals with me.
Good luck everyone.
Stay safe and stay awesome!!
Gábor
|
|
|
3
Comments
|
|
