Nearly everyone has heard of Tinder. It was the “original” dating app that gamified trying to find love, or get laid. If you’re not familiar with it – likely because you haven’t been dating anytime over the past 10 years – then it’s really a simple concept. You match with people you like, you chat, date, and ideally things go well. However, there’s a whole world of nastiness behind it, and some of it’s users will gladly attest to these things, with others being completely oblivious.

I began writing this article as last week I got a shock I never saw coming. My account in Tinder got banned. I wish I could tell you why, but I’m absolutely clueless – with one exception that I’ll get into later in this post. With so many other apps out there, why would I care – especially with Tinder in hot competition as the worst dating app out there. Well, they kind of own everything and have the dating market cornered. Oh, and they’re evil.

Have you realized there’s a serious lack of emails in your inbox from Nigerian princes claiming you’ve magically inherited $7,285,51, but all you need to do is pay the processing fees to get the money? That’s no shock as everyone knows of those scams by now, even Grandma. If scammers are going to pull one over on you, they’re going to have to change up their tactics. And, they have.

The essence of a good scam is rooted in a couple of things. You want the victim to feel a sense of entitlement, you want them to feel a sense of reward, and you want to promise them

The latest scam revolves around a little social engineering to get you to reveal your 2FA keys. It’s actually pretty brilliant, and sadly I can see a lot of people falling prey as it’s so simplistic. Any good scam is at it’s core, and this one is incredibly well designed. Here’s how it goes down.

The inevitable happened to me today. I had something fail, and it’s wasn’t just a “little” something, either. My Synology DS1515+ NAS just won’t power on. This is the device that houses basically all of my data. I’ve got it configured in a RAID setup (I’ll talk about this more later), but the actual device just is dead. There was a power outage earlier today in a good portion of the city and I powered off my units before the battery backups were drained. When the power was restored, everything came back up but my NAS. The thing is, I’m sitting here very calm and not feeling panic in the least because I know I’m going to be OK.

But this wasn’t always the case. About 7 years ago I lost a TON of data. Basically everything. All my photos, music, movies, documents. It was a mess and I was devastated. I’d built a NAS on Ubuntu and had 5 drives in a RAID configuration – only 3 drives died and I had no idea until it was too late. I still have that server and there’s a reasonable chance I can recover a good portion of my data, but it’ll be $2500 and frankly I’ve been OK with that data loss. But, I learned a very valuable lesson and I’ll never let it happen again.

In this economy, who doesn’t need a couple extra bucks these days? I’ll tell you who, that silver spooned trust fund baby wearing $4000 sneakers that complete the $8300 “homeless chic” look. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get a little taste of that feeling where you aren’t thinking about how much cash is in the bank each time you swipe your debit card buying avocado toast? Well, the simple answer is you setup a legal scam and let them buy into it. But not just any scam. It’s got to get these rich kids to drool.

Well, a ponzi scheme is easy pickings for dumb 20 year olds with too much cash, but you’re nowhere near as smart as Bernie Madoff and that kinda crap landed even him in jail. Hold them hostage? Nah, that never works out all that well. We need something that’s going to pull at their heartstrings, open their wallets, and create some top-tier content for their Instagram and dating profile photos. I’ve got it!

Chances are that you, one of your children, or at very least someone you know is taking school classes online. This number has obviously exploded with the pandemic and basically the entirety of the world’s schooling being virtual, however at this point we’re more or less “back to normal”. Prior to the pandemic there absolutely was e-learning software out there, but for obvious reasons they’ve become far more prevalent since March 2020.

Enter Lanschool. A program initially developed in the 80’s, but really went into the modern era in 2018 with their “Lanschool Air” version. Think of their classic program as being a parental control program on a computer, but their “air” version being exactly the same only it’s completely remotely administered. Oh, and it’s also got a really cool feature that allows the “teacher” to have complete control over the user’s computer. Yes that’s right, they can secretly enable microphones, the webcam, have full access to view, edit, and deleted your files – heck, they can even add ones of their own! They can log all of your keystrokes, meaning that they can even record all of your usernames/passwords, or credit card information, all in the background. Simply put, Lanschool is a completely evil tool and you need to be aware of what you’re giving someone access to if you’ve got it installed on any of your devices.

Back in July 2020 I wrote a long winded Facebook post about why TikTok was basically a virus that you gladly implanted into your life, and why it should be deleted immediately. The post came with a lot of reactions such as “I don’t care”, “I like the dances!”, and other completely checked out replies. A few people seemed concerned, but I’d be curious as to how many actually deleted the app from their devices. That post is forever lost when I deleted my old Facebook account, hence why it’s not linked here.

I wrote that diatribe a few days before it hit more mainstream media. I read a lot of security and tech blogs, which is where this info I was sharing was initially disclosed. Basically some guy reverse engineered the app and dug around it’s source code to look into what it was doing. The gist is that it’s run by the Chinese Government, the app collects everything about you it possibly can, has tons of very concerning back-doors into your device, and now… there’s more.

You seriously need to delete this app. And I’m going to tell you why.