I posted a video on Xiaohongshu about the fact that I’m learning Mandarin and was flooded with, among other things, requests to become my teacher and for me to sign up for courses. In that process, I did end up talking to someone who’s picking their English education back up. We’ve essentially agreed to be pen pals.

No mention of courses or anything like that. Green flag. She’s also been on the app since mid-2024, so well before the influx of Americans could have been anticipated. Green flag. But she asked to exchange contact info so I gave her my email address and hers is a {a bunch of random numbers}@qq.com.

That immediately set off alarm bells for me, as the random number email addresses I’ve seen have been anonymous throwaways. But I don’t want this to be me being culturally insensitive and just ignorant about something. Maybe it’s more common in China due to Unicode compatibility?

  • CloutAtlas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    24 hours ago

    QQ email addresses are normally a bunch of numbers because a lot of older people are bad with pinyin and you can’t have 汉字hàn zì in email names apparently.

    You need a government ID to get a phone number, and you need a phone number to get an email address with QQ, being a scammer with a QQ email is probably the least efficient way of going about it when you can just make an email on a western service without having to require a phone number.