Beware of the scam behind "astrology"

Open a discussion group or forum related to divination, and you can see the worries of some young people: Do you want to break up? Can I go ashore? What should I do if I want to leave my job and can't find a job? The reporter found that these young people are obsessed with the mainstream of divination, and they project all kinds of anxieties into the unknown "fate", hoping to find a way to break the game.

Zhang Xin, an associate professor at the School of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences at Peking University, believes that fortune telling, whether online or offline, is to meet people's psychological needs. He said that people's emotions or life pressures often come from the uncertainty of life.

Compared with offline divination shops, the wind of online divination seems to be more fierce, and it has gradually become a new "wealth code". According to media reports, on an eight-character fortune teller online consultation platform, the "master" of the "marriage and love feelings" column charges ranging from 138 yuan to 498 yuan. The "master" with the most "orders" has received a total of 3128 orders since entering the market in 2017. According to the incomplete statistics of the financial service information platform "Investment Community", nearly 20 divination numerology products received financing from 2014 to 2019. According to the data disclosed to the public, there are 9 projects that have obtained financing of more than 10 million yuan.

The reporter searched in Tianyan and found that there were hundreds of enterprises with "feng shui", "divination" and "tarot" as their business. Subsequently, the reporter searched for "divination" as a keyword in the mobile phone store, and dozens of Apps appeared, including consulting items such as fate Q&A, constellation horoscope, peach blossom analysis, etc., and there was also a kaiyun mall to sell cinnabar bracelets, Honmei Buddha pendants, auspicious Nafu crystal trees and other products, with prices ranging from tens of yuan to hundreds of yuan.

But some insiders pointed out that there are more and more scams hidden behind this. Wang Huiqing, a doctoral student at the Law School of Nanjing University, believes that "network divination" means that traditional feudal superstitions put on the cloak of modern science and technology and use modern technology to meet the psychological needs of contemporary youth to excuse themselves. At present, network divination has bred illegal acts such as network pyramid schemes and network fraud, on the one hand, it presents the development trend of pyramid schemes, on the other hand, it breeds network fraud, some operators set up marketers to find potential customers for them, through professional words to obtain the basic information of the parties, such as age, marital status, work situation, etc., and relayed to the operators, after obtaining relevant information, state the basic information of the parties in the form of false divination, get the trust of the parties, and then require the parties to buy" Derivative products such as kaiguang charms and "transfer charms" defraud the parties of money.

"Illegal acts bred by online divination will cause great harm to young people." Wang Huiqing suggested that legal measures should be taken as soon as possible to draw a legal red line for them to prevent them from causing losses to the safety of the public's personal and property and adversely affecting social order.

Han Rong, Shi Jia (From China Youth Daily)

Source: Tonight's newspaper