Friday, September 30, 2022

#WeAreTécnico

Exactly 10 years after I joined Técnico Lisboa for the first time for my masters, this month Técnico created an alumni network to connect past and present students and faculty of the university. It has a LinkedIn integration. If you too are from Técnico, feel free to say hi!

Técnico alumni network

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

YouTube fake conversations to deceive the innocent onlookers

I encountered this identical conversation between 3 random people on two different videos in YouTube!
A friendly conversation between three strangers? Totally not.

I decided to dig a bit into this. It was easier to spot the deception than I thought. All three accounts were created on the very same day in 2020 (and magically appeared to make the same conversation twice in summer 2022). We can easily conclude that these three accounts were created by the same person or a computer script.




I looked further and found many similar fake conversations happening around topics of investment and crypto trading under popular YouTube videos. An unsuspecting onlooker could totally fall for these scams! All these fake conversationalists have no videos, very few subscribers, and created on the same day (as above) or within a few days/weeks apart - perhaps by a bot and stolen profile photos. Beware!
A similar, but longer "conversation" - but with better "participants" (with accounts not created on the same day). LOL.