Escort services using Facebook to recruit

By Francis Bea Published February 6, 2013

facebook alert — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Facebook is a haven for job recruiters, and now that Graph Search is in place we’re finding out that means all sorts of… recruiters. Gangs have been known to look for potential new members via Facebook, and even a Canadian escort service has joined in to find new faces. While recruitment to an escort service itself isn’t breaking any rules, the Canadian Press reports that this company was knowingly recruiting or contacting underaged girls on Facebook.

A 17 year old girl came forward with this news to The Daily Dot, which has uncovered the seedy underbelly of recruiting for positions via social media. All it took was for the escort service to offer its services to underaged girls, and to ask for referrals from these girls with an attractive salary of $500 per day. The escort service declined to admit that it had done something wrong in the first place, citing the fact that it doesn’t actually employ these minors, but the Canadian government has discovered that the escort service was being run illegally without an operational license and it has thus been forced to close its doors.

Recommended Videos

If anything, this should service as yet another warning to clean up your profile. It could mean the difference between a message from a dream employer and an escort service.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Francis got his first taste of the tech industry in a failed attempt at a startup during his time as a student at the…

Topics

Social Media

Discord’s next big feature could put your conversations on Google Search

The privacy issue is obvious, so here's how to stop it

Discord on PC Featured

Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.

According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.

Social Media

X has a creepy new way to make you promote your posts, and nobody asked for it

A mysterious pointing hand is haunting X drafts, and users are not amused.

You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.

Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.

Computing

Dictionary.com’s word of the year is one that you’re tired of seeing everywhere on the internet

From looksmaxxing to tokenmaxxing, the internet has found endless ways to max out everyday life, and now the trend has earned Dictionary.com's top linguistic honor.

Dictionary.com open on iPhone

Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.

What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?