TikTok: "magic" codes to miraculously earn money, like in The Sims

TECH & WEB WTF

iStock / Kerkez

To earn money, have a perfect body or find love without moving a finger, TikTokeurs offer magic cheat codes that work if written or recited aloud. Kind of like The Sims.

If you've ever played The Sims, the words "motherlode", "rosebud" and "kaching" are certainly very familiar to you. For the non-connoisseurs, these are cheat codes – cheat codes – that we enter in the game's dialog box and which allow our virtual household to instantly earn a large sum of money. And bam, 50,000 Simoleons in the wallet!

On TikTok, videos that have gone viral offer to use this cheating technique … in real life. For several weeks, subscribers to the platform have been sharing content containing mysterious encrypted messages called "Gabovroi codes". As the UK edition of Vice explains, these codes are supposed to make us miraculously earn money, meet the love of our life, get healthy or get the body of our dreams effortlessly.

To use them, nothing could be simpler: all you have to do is recite the sequence of magic numbers of your choice aloud, or write it on a sheet of paper or with your finger pointing it in the air. Here, here.

@Yanks23 @analiss If you don't know how to use an ellipsis, how can I take you seriously?

— Morgana Wed Mar 31 05:31:16 +0000 2021

Already many followers across the Atlantic

If this new trend makes you want to smile (or bang your head against a wall, as you wish), it already has many followers across the Atlantic. This is the case of the TikTokeuse anilasita, 172,000 subscribers, who tells in one of her videos how luck smiled on her after using a cheat code.

"I had heard of these Gabrovoi codes but I was very skeptical, we are not in the Sims, it's real life here, she laughs. And then I tried, to see. I used the code 520 741 8 to receive money unexpectedly. I wrote the code in the air and recited it out loud twice with a smile on my lips, before saying in my head 'Universe, if it's real, then show it to me.' And then, I arrive at the supermarket, and there is a cart waiting for me with a coin still inside! This had never happened to me before! Then, I made a deal at work."

Others even use these codes to heal their physical or mental health. “The code 55515 made my pain disappear, it did not cure me definitively but my pain went away”, says a user in the comments of another video dedicated to the phenomenon.

Later in the comments, another TikTokeuse explains that the codes serve as substitutes for her allergy medication: "I literally used the code for the allergy instead of taking a decongestant two days ago - I haven't had any problems since. There is a pollen spike in Texas right now though!"

A phenomenon derived from the "Manifesting" trend

A few months ago, a new wellness trend appeared on TikTok and Instagram: Manifesting. This trend, which literally means "manifest", is taken from the book The Secret by author Rhonda Byrne. Published in 2006, the book takes up the foundations of the law of attraction and develops the idea that our thoughts and reality are closely linked. Basically, the more you think about something you want, the more likely you are to get it. "I'm going to lose weight, I'm going to get a promotion, I'm going to meet the man or the woman who will change my life, I'm going to recover from an illness."

This seemingly harmless practice has taken on a disproportionate scale on social networks. It is "because of it" that the famous Gabrovoi codes emerged, which can become problematic as soon as they are taken a little too seriously. After all, if one Internet user has gone so far as to trade in her allergy medication for a series of magic numbers, who knows how far other TikTokers will go?

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