We should all be familiar by now with charity scams and how they work. Door-to-door conmen (and women) asking for donations to charities that don’t exist, street collections by scammers who aren’t really collecting for the charities they claim to be collecting for and cold calling and fishing scams, on the phone or by email. The scams are nothing new. They’ve always been there. Inevitably, the internet age has inspired even more fraudsters and they are even more cunning than ever.
I tend to use social media less than I used to. I have got rid of Elon Musk’s X, I refuse to use tik tok, especially since the far right allies of Donald Trump have bought into it, and I have pared back my use of Facebook. The latter is very interesting because of its heavy use of AI generated algorithms which these days plague the site. It homes on anything you say and steers you to all manner of other sites and products, not all of which you might want have anything to do with. I find some of them quite sick-making.
Today I came across one advertisement called Mental Health Matters, which was advertising some very cheap hoodies. The ad goes likes this:
‘Quality is typical cheap polyester. AVOID‘
