Old folk sayings, chills

When Mandy Appleyard discovered that her photograph was being used by a stranger online, she began a personal quest to find out how it had happened
…I was annoyed — but first things first. I would need to contact Match, explain the mess and have it investigate then report back: simple. Except that contacting Match as a non-subscriber was a challenge beyond my capabilities. I pored over the website. “Match does not have a customer support phone number … Please be aware that there are fake customer support numbers posted on various websites, none of which are affiliated with Match.” My blood was boiling by the time I read: “Profile checking: all ads and photos are checked individually before they are published.” What? My photos certainly hadn’t been checked or they wouldn’t have been published on a false profile for millions of people to see.
I asked my friend if he could message Clare5432 to tell her we were on to her. He kindly did so, but came back to me within minutes to say she had blocked him. “Would you contact Match then, and complain on my behalf?” I asked him. “Get them to take it down?” He did that, and Match took the profile down within hours. I assumed, naively, that was the end of the story…
Knowing my face had been used to create a bogus dating profile, I was irritated that someone had stolen my picture and at least part of my bio to sell themselves under false pretences. Terrible things happen on the internet, which from some angles looks like a cesspit of fraud, depravity and deception. What had happened to me wasn’t the crime of the century but it felt decidedly icky.
Things were about to get worse. In January another male friend phoned me to say he was on Match and had seen my profile on there. He knew I wasn’t online dating so he was immediately suspicious. I realised we were on familiar territory when he sent me a screenshot of “Wendy, 63, in Wakefield”. It was the image of me that had been used last time, with a profile that described an outdoorsy free spirit. My pal immediately contacted Match on my behalf and straight away it took the profile down.
When this happened for the third time, earlier this month, I was livid. A male friend of a friend said he’d been reading my profile on Match the night before and really liked it. “Great picture of you too,” he messaged. I told him I wasn’t on Match and asked him to send me a screenshot. He hasn’t — and now seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. I can only assume “my” image and profile are still up there for the world to see and exploit.
So I now know that my identity has been stolen by online dating scammers at least three times, although it could be 1,003 times for all I know. I’m made aware of the theft only when someone I know happens to stumble across it and takes the trouble to alert me.
“Don’t you feel just a bit flattered that someone has used your picture? They must think you’re attractive to have bothered!” a friend suggested. The answer is that I don’t. No part of me is flattered, instead I find it deeply creepy. It feels like a trespass on my life, a theft over which I have no control, an invasion of my privacy that makes me feel queasy but which I can’t stop happening again. And again.
I posted on Facebook that I was looking for advice on how to close this fraud down once and for all, hoping someone in my online social media community would have an answer. They did — but not the one I was hoping for. A journalist friend said this probably wasn’t a lone woman using a false profile as romantic bait. Instead, she suggested, it was more likely to be the work of an industrial-scale scam where gangs of people in “fraud factories” (often in north Africa and southeast Asia) create false profiles on dating sites using stolen photos and false information. They then contact potential victims. Over time the conversations become more intimate and personal as the scammer builds trust with their target.
The targets are often vulnerable people in their fifties, sixties and seventies, perhaps new to dating after long marriages that have ended in divorce or bereavement, sometimes lonely, invariably trusting. Low-hanging fruit, in other words, for the wily thieves who groom them, telling them how beautiful and desirable they are, forge a speedy romantic connection then ask for money — a little to begin with, a lot later on…
These scammers commit a fraud, the false profile is reported and shut down, but the con artists immediately set up a new false profile using the same pictures — and on and on it goes.
Sadly there are a thousand iterations of this scenario: coercive controllers who manipulate vulnerable people into believing they have found love. They send photographs, gifs, songs and poems during their “courtship”, telling their victims they are surgeons or spies, Nasa physicists or retired army colonels. They send (stolen) pictures of their children, their luxury home, their fast car, then one day start asking for gift cards, crypto, or money to buy heart surgery or a flight home.
The people perpetuating these cybercrimes are often doing so because they have been trafficked and trapped. Sixty Kenyans were rescued from “fraud factories” after the customer service jobs they applied for in Thailand turned out to be a cover for cybercrime. One woman had been promised a monthly salary of £675 but ended up targeting Americans by creating enticing profiles on Tinder, Instagram and Facebook. “They fall in love with you and you can tell them about cryptocurrency. You start stealing from them,” the 31-year-old woman said, describing in Swahili how she was forced to work in a vast call centre-like hall with hundreds of people of many nationalities…
All of which brings us back to my predicament and how I’m being made to feel complicit in these grubby scams. My face is being used to deceive trusting people who could be fleeced of everything. The victims of a serious and organised crime repeated over and over again but which remains outside the victims’ control. I’m the frontwoman for online activity that may be illegal or dishonest. If it’s neither of those things it’s still plain embarrassing, because I have no idea what the person using my image is saying or doing.
Someone who knows exactly how this feels is Christian Gerhard Boving, a Danish doctor who says scammers have been using photos of him for years to target victims online. “Suddenly all these pictures were stolen by scammers using them to hit on innocent people around the world. They are cruel, sophisticated and evil people doing this.”
Boving has called on companies such as Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to do more. “There should be verification of every new profile being created, like you have to verify yourself with a passport or driving licence, so you know it’s a real person behind the profile,” he says. Perhaps social media companies could use AI to trawl for photographs they know have been stolen and used before on fraudulent accounts — mine and Boving’s, for starters. Certainly the companies running dating apps should make it easy for non-subscribers such as me to contact them with a complaint.
The problem is getting worse, the latest figures showing that reports of romance fraud have risen by almost 60 per cent over four years. Action Fraud, the UK’s centre for fraud and cybercrime, says dating apps are a common place for scammers to find their victims. The top five platforms they use are Facebook, Plenty of Fish, Instagram, Tinder and Match.
As a journalist I like to think that I’m pretty savvy in the ways of the world, but stealing my credit card is one thing; stealing my face is something else. I’m tempted, next time this happens (and I have no doubt there will be a next time), to join whichever dating app is responsible and strike up a conversation with my alter ego. Let’s see where that takes me. Watch this space — and this face.

For those of you familiar with her, I know this is kind of old news. But for others, basically she faked her whole career as a YouTube influencer. She pretends to be super well known and talented. But it turns out that she most likely buys all her likes and follows. Recently, I got interested in her drama as I saw she wrote and acted in her own move of sorta, “the trapper trap, rise of princess glamourite.” Well, I watched the trailer on YouTube and her acting is hilariously bad. She even got awards for her show from some fake websites to try and make her movie look credible. I commented on her video saying how bad it was and she deleted my comment.. How can someone that old fake a career so long? She has to be like 25 by now… doesn’t she have real dreams that don’t include faking being a celebrity? The whole thing is so weird and fascinating to me.

Okay, so apparently preservation is a bad thing according to this subreddit??
People invite comments on their post, and we’re not allowed opinions?
So, it’s their home, so they can rip out the walls, level it, all in the name of “iT’s tHeiR HoMe, not a MuSEUM,” At what point do you draw the line?
It’s such a hollow argument to say not all old stuff is better. No, it’s not, but a high percentage of the times it probably is better. Saying this kind of stuff gives people the confidence and ammunition to commit all sorts of crazy renovations on century homes carte blanche.
If we let everyone do anything they want to every century home out there, how much is going to be left for those of us who prefer century homes they way they were? Or will even be left in existence. Preservation has its place. Just saying.

When theorising in astrophysics, and more specifically the beginning and expansion of the universe (the big bang), the phenomenon of black holes and the mysteries behind dark matter and dark energy, we mistakenly use the two concepts interchangeably, they being 1. The philosophical zero, ie nothingness, and 2. The mathematics concept of zero, ie summarily attaching the philosophical concept of zero, with a numerical designation because it greatly assists the functionality of mathematic in the paradigm of our observable reality. Also please bearing mind the the math concept of zero allows negative values, unlike the philosophy, and when discussing space time, there is no place for negative numbers. Now that said and made clear, I believe it impossible for us to attempt to explain the unimaginable, without separation and distinction of the two concepts when infinity is brought into the conversation. Infinity, like zero, is a philosophical concept not all that dissimilar to zero, it has a mathematical conceptual basis also, but unlike the philosophical zero ie nothingness, it is given a numerical designation that more accurately relates to it philosophically, even though it is not strictly a number and cannot he used in any tangible calculation, mathematics certainly allows for its philosophical manifestation into mathematical equations.
I see this as a huge conflict, especially as it the very essence of big bang theory ie from nothing came infinity at the moment of the big bang. We surely cannot hope to solve this puzzle if the universe if we are conceptually flawed at he very starting point. 0 and infinity therefore cannot be used together in any calculation because we haven't yet reconciled the two conceptually. How can we look at this differently? How can we navigate passed mathematical dogma a concepts our brains are not capable of truly understanding on a practical level?
These are very tough existential and philosophical problems. So rather than just critise the current order and point out what I see as conflicts, but offer no alternative, may I suggest at least a starting point for discussion and exploration which may be found in the area of fractal science/mathematics. And a good place to focus the beginning of any theoretical discourse, in my opinion would be the work of, amoung others, Mandelbrot and the set named after him, the Mandelbrot Set. I suggest this because it mathematically the most relevant area of a field and is largely avoided by the popular culture's interest in fractals which is largely forcused on aesthetical beauty, particularly popular with the psychedelic subculture which I believe has a place and time to be investigated as a part of the whole discussion, but maybe for now should not be a point of focus in fear of contaminating a sterile discussion with with larger philosophically arguments about what is reality, due to the psychedelic substance insights of those schools. To incorporate any talk of altered states of consciousness, may be counter productive at this time. Hence my Mandelbrot suggestion achieves the mathematical parameters I believe are the best for theoretical mathematical support and cancels out the annoying noise that the fractal science field makes due to its attractiveness to non mainstream pop culture.
The Mandelbrot set is intriguing, not only because of the almost mindblowing graphical capability of AI, for as the Mandelbrot set seen by AI and then visualised for us to see, is nothing short of unbelievably beautiful. It also has an ability to provoke inner hought and discourse without one knowing the subject, topic or reason for the quiet peaceful internal discourse it inspires. I mention this, not because it can directly be incorporated in the radical discussion, but experiencing the astonishlng complexity if its beauty and the way it continues infinitely (or rather as long as it continues to be observed) because if the very self contained nature of the Mandelbrot set. After all, the mandelbrit set is simply a set of numbers, that when placed in the equation, do not spiral out into infinity. The equation value is always >0 or <2. So what as I see as irony, as the set was designed to avoid infinity in a sense, what it actually does is provide us with the best possible conceptualisation, in practice and theory, of a model demonstrating infinity. Even more bizarre is that the technology had only recently become available to show us visually by AI graphing. I'm not sure without the visual stimulus, could we have seen how beautifully fractal science demonstrates its potential unravelling existential and theoretical mysteries. I believe it lends itself perfectly to my proposed theory.
I think so because infinity is difficult for the human mind to grasp, some may say impossible. What is even more difficult for our minds to grasp is infinity of reducted values. Basically, if infinity can exist in an expanding sense, then it is not a stretch of conceptualisation to think it can infinitely get smaller. This breaks no rules of science. Searching for the building block of the universe has been crusade of quantum physicists dating back to the creation of the scientific theory. Much money and effort has been spent in search for smaller and smaller still subatomic particles. What they do is fractal science in its purest form, yet like with the study of Theoretical Astrophysics, quantum science theory is its self hampered by the concept if zero as a number, in my opinion. Even doing the work of factually reducing matter, they are blinded to its possible futility, should fractal reduction does forever decend in to fractal infinity or -ve infinity. For if that is the case, maybe quantum theory is in fact mankind's first exploration, albeit unknowingly, into what may well be a black hole. That is for a later discussion but certainly worth bringing to the attention for the purposes of this discussion.
So if we can accept that -ve infinity is as equally viable and logical as +ve infinity, what room in this discussion is left for the inclusion of zero? 1/r = 1/0 = infinity is a useless equation in understanding black holes. To say 1/r approaches infinity as r becomes closer to 0, is a much better way of phrasing it. It is in essence exactly what I refer to +be and -ve infinity and immensely helpful in understanding black holes, there's no equation that mathematics can put forward it's anywhere near as helpful because mathematics has to use zero and by its own rules and attempt to explain a fractal infinity is undefined.
I believe this leaves no room for zero in the same conversation as infinity. I am not suggesting zero should be stricken from mathematics. However I am suggesting that mathematics use of zero may, invalidate is ongoing use as an effective tool for measurement and communication, when the subject is beyond our ability to comprehend. Few people will argue that our 6 senses are significantly lacking the capacity to comprehend cosmological dynamics. Mathematics nothing more than an application of our 6 senses, to make sense of the chaos occurring all around us. Over hundreds and thousands of years, this is the best we have been able to do in terms of calculation and accurate prediction of future occurances. Even the concept of zero is less than 1000 years old. The Romans saw no use in incorporating it into their model, and to this day we wonder at their and other ancient civilisations ability for astonishing accuracy in measurement and prediction. Look at all they, the Egyptians and others managed without using zero in a single calculation. We can also break this down out of our conscious paradigm into nature. Numbers do not exist in nature (that includes the universe). It begs the question of do numbers really exist? Are numbers no more than part of our delusional reality? Who knows, but one thing is for sure, zero certainly doesn't exist anywhere outside of our consciousness. Not even in our own very bodies. How bodies clearly hold a knowledge that hasn't seemed to be passed over to our conscious, aware selves. Even on the smallest scale, without any intervention or guidance from any sort of intelligence, within our cellular membranes. Complex calculations are constantly being carried out. Consider cellular replication for example. In order for a cell to divide successfully, there must be a correct allocation of resources, let's just say primarily energy distribution for the sake of brevity. To split a cell but calculate the energy necessary to simply cary put the force of splitting. It must also calculate how much energy needs to be transfered to the new cell. This calculation must include how much energy for it take to replicate all cellular matter, how much energy is required for both cells to recover from the trauma, and how much energy on top of that, the new cell will require to become mature and begin its own replication. There are multiple complex calculations to be made there, and they then must be combined in to an overall and more complicated calculation again. All of this is done without intelligence and without using numbers ie mathematics. This same process can be observed all the way back to the very first beginning of not just life, but biochemistry in general. So I hope this demonstrates that the universe doesn't exist numerically. There are no rules in the universe. We created rules for our sciences, because if we didn't follow them the sciences would fail at unacceptable percentage of predictions.
So we make rules to overcome the shortcomings while waiting for future technologies or fixes. Mathematics and sciences are little more than a carefully ordered tapestry of rules, with too many exeptions for too many rules. We create rules and ideas to assist the conteived & malfunctioning intangible thing to not have to go to all the trouble of finding something that works better. We are just littered with examples through every field. Like 'zero', or Pi, or "bimdas" (brackets, indicies, multiply, division, addition and subtraction. I find this a good example, for not following this exact order of calculations, a correct answer to equation will nev a result) and thousands of others.
No rules exist in nature, it appears to be that it just is, always will be and always has been.
So in summary, given our restrictions on trying to understand the universe, namely intelligence, our 6 limited senses, our arrogance and our mortality, should we narrow the pursuits our restrictions can make us comfortable with? Thisbwilk lead us nowhere. By abandoning zero as the only accepted scientific approach to the universe, and allowing science to have multiple validating throeries for what is the same problem. The scientific community abhors divergence from dogma and academics are held to ransom with funding or being published, if their ideas are not with acceptable parameters.
But for the sake of this conversation, can we discuss the merits of looking at the big bang without reference to nothing ie zero, but instead +ve and -ve infinity.