Security

When your “best friend” on WeChat isn’t who you think If you’re an American living in China, or an international student about to land at a Chinese campus, this one’s for you: imagine you get a WeChat video call from your closest buddy. You see their face, hear their voice, everything looks normal — and they ask, dead serious, to help transfer money for an “emergency.” You do it. Later you find out the whole video call was a deepfake, a real-time AI trick: face, expressions, and voice all synthesized on the fly. That’s not sci-fi anymore — it’s a scam that hit people already, and it moves fast. ...

Heads-up: Why wechat spyware matters to US people and students in China If you’re a United States student, expat, or traveler in China, WeChat is more than a chat app — it’s your wallet, your dormmate noticeboard, your ride-hailing app and your social lifeline. That convenience comes with trade-offs. Over the years, tech and surveillance stories have shown how software, services, and even storage gear can be adapted or marketed for monitoring purposes. That’s the backdrop when people talk about “WeChat spyware”: concerns about hidden data collection, account snooping, or third-party tools that scrape messages and metadata. ...