Ryan who? I know I’ve seen that name before, but where? Hmm. Mr Google: who is he? Answer: he’s an international fitness coach and creator of the best-selling fitness series Advanced Abs™ and The Female Fat Loss Handbook™. No, that doesn’t ring a bell. I’m not in the best physical shape of my life but there’s no logical reason why I should have an interest in The Female Fat Loss Handbook™ so why do I know him? Because this ‘international fitness coach is all over Facebook. And it’s nonsense. Allow me to explain.
Quite possibly for the purpose of advertising his professional status, Mr Engel is one of these irritating people who ask dreary questions and literally millions of people answer them. Here are a few:
- If you could time-travel, what year would you go back to and where?
- You enter the gym and your theme song plays. What is it?
- DEBATE: what’s the best Christmas movie of all time?
- What your secret security word and your favourite password? (I may have made this one up.)
To be fair to Mr Engel, I don’t think he is one of the social media confidence men who seek to drain your bank account but here’s the thing: he could accidentally be an enabler of such scams. For example, some folk set their social media accounts as ‘open’, where everyone can look through the version of your life you choose to share with a waiting world. Or you could have ‘friends’ who you only know through, let’s say, a football fans forum. Then, you make it clear just who your footballing preferences are, nicknames and all, and it becomes that much easier to expose yourself to fraud. For minds trained in fraud, it can be easier than you think to access personal details of someone else.
And before you say, “People are far too smart to fall for internet scams”, I reply, really? How many times have you seen shared things like free holidays, free camper vans and free anything you want if you just share something on Facebook? Much of this, as we have noted before, is ‘like farming’ where potentially you can expose internet friends to scammers. And how many people fell for the video of President Zelenskyy and his wife apparently singing Endless Love? The latter wasn’t some kind of financial scam but it was plainly false, yet people kept sharing it over and over again.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t share their trivia with Mr Engel, although I might suggest there were better and more rewarding ways to spend your time. And why risk exposing one’s self to possible fraud?
If in doubt, refer to one of the fact-checking sites like Snopes and Full Fact. Some internet untruths may be harmless, but why embrace and share them? In any event, why are people sharing untruths in the first place? Ignorance or malice? Sometimes it’s not easy to tell.
