Everyone is talking about Temu (the Amazon-style online market place in China full of cheap off-brand crap) on social media today after their £50 free cash giveaway went viral. Basically all you have to do is download the Temu app and register, then send out an “invitation code” to others. Once both individuals sign up, boom – you both receive £50 in your PayPal.
Sounds too good to be true, but from the looks of things, people have been raking in the cash all day. You can even collect multiple £50 rewards into your PayPal depending on how many people you sign up:
i am running this shit like the mafia https://t.co/5pT8o5sQLw pic.twitter.com/mSdwtM5o0N
— billy (@billydyson_) March 24, 2024
This is absurd. Would love to see Temu’s user count graph 📈🤯https://t.co/CXRF6fkeEc pic.twitter.com/fYCsK03O3f
— Joe Welstead ☀️ (@JoeWelstead) March 26, 2024
Temu literally paying out into PayPal 🤣
Use this – https://t.co/P5afCHR34o pic.twitter.com/z3cuuYkFfr
— Tom Hassan (@TomHasssan1) March 25, 2024
mate how are temu affording this lmao pic.twitter.com/kw4Up4E4mB
— thefootballaddicts (@rahjfootball) March 26, 2024
So far, so legit. It appears Temu are literally paying absurd amounts of cash into people’s PayPal accounts, despite how financially unrealistic this would be for any company.
And so, it’s probably a good idea to take a closer look at the Terms & Conditions, located in the top corner where you sign up for your free cash.
To begin with, the rules state that Temu can, “cancel, change, suspend, or modify any aspect of the Program at any time, including, without limitation, the availability of any Rewards or other benefits without notice.” So you may sign up for a Temu account and get all your friends to do the same without receiving any money, or they might even find a means to withdraw the money back out of your account, if they want.
Temu can also decide to not give you money directly into your PayPal account, but rather Temu credits to use on their website: “Sponsor reserves the right to substitute a Reward of equal or greater value, e.g. Temu credits, at any time in its sole discretion, including, without limitation, when a Reward is no longer available.”
Most worryingly though, is that by signing up, you are consenting to handing over large amounts of data to Temu (a Chinese company, remember) and they can pretty much do anything they want with it. They’ll have the rights to your likeliness for all eternity, which they can sell to anyone they want, use for promotional purposes, and even make Deepfake videos/images of you:
signing away the right for temu to use your likeness and voice, worldwide, forever, with no legal protection for £40 is wild 💀💀💀 pic.twitter.com/qKm6uukdFS
— emily (@yeemilyee) March 26, 2024
Now you might think that’s totally worth £50 or argue that “every app uses your data”, but I’m not sure I’ve heard of another app that has unrestricted right to use ANY of your data in ANY way they want, now or in the future, and not be liable for it since you consented to it all for £50.
Not to mention, Temu are already embroiled in a lawsuit for being dodgy with user data:
I guess one way to prevent any future lawsuits is to bribe people with £50 rewards in order to hand their details over. These details include basically everything in your phone, your likeness, your contacts, your online activity etc. Imagine how much that information is worth to them and how badly they want it if they’re willing to fork out so much cash over it?
Even still, it does seem mental that they can afford to part with that much money, so I’ve got a feeling that this Temu cash giveaway is even dodgier than it seems on the surface. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out over the next few days…
For the Mykonos beach bar caught charging English-speaking tourists thousands of Euros for oysters and beer, click HERE.
