TikTok, an app used by millions around the world to create homemade music videos, skits, and other forms of entertainment, a short-form of Youtube if you will. It features a plethora of puppy videos, little kids being precious and hilarious, and your next door neighbors homemade skits.
Generation Z (the generation preceded by the millennial generation, people that fall into generation Z were born between 1995 and 2015) are the app’s biggest demographic. But things on what were previously considered an app that was used as a lighthearted, fun pass time, have taken a darker turn.
Like Instagram, TikTok operates off of users posting images and videos. This makes it an ideal platform for sexting, impersonation, and predators. Scammers have taken to creating profiles that they then fill with videos of random women, most often showing them in minimal clothing, dancing, or working out. The captions of the posts often include popular hashtags in order to be picked up by TikTok’s algorithms. When users follow such accounts they are then often sent a link via private messaging, inviting them to a “chat room” or to sign up for an 18+ Snapchat account, with promises of receiving nudes or sexual videos in return.
Some of these accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers, and their postages get thousands of likes and comments. This furthers the idea that these accounts are run by real people, namely the women that they feature in their posts. Users who then follow these links and online invitations are often then lead to private and monetized Snapchat profiles. These profiles often charge a subscription or membership fee in order to gain access to their daily catalog of pictures of various nude women and pornographic videos.
These accounts sometimes also feature hyperlinks that lead the baited user to another site. This becomes lucrative for the people running these elaborate schemes for a few reasons. For one, the going rate for subscription to the Snapchat accounts themselves are anywhere from around $5.00 USD to $30.00 USD, according to a study done by HuffPost. While the initial fees themselves can be bringing in quite a bit of money, once the users enter the credit card information they are now also vulnerable to have their card information stolen. As well, by driving traffic to other sites, the scammers often earn an affiliate fee that can be anywhere between $1.00 to $3.00 per visit. When you’re considering the thousands of kids, teens and young adults scammed by these hoaxes everyday, you could be earning some serious money.
While TikTok has claimed that it has elaborate algorithms and safeguards put in place to protect young people from such scams, it’s hard to know where on the internet is safe for kids anymore. Porn-grifters are crafty, it’s something that they’re known for. But keeping an eye on what your kids are doing during their screen time is becoming more pertinent now than ever before.
By: Devon Clare Banfield
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