I joined Chinese TikTok alternative RedNote and regretted it

When Congress passed the TikTok ban, I thought I’d take a look at Xiaohongshu, aka RedNote, China’s answer to the social media app suddenly flooded with protesting American “Tiktok refugees.”

The first few hours of scrolling through the app felt like you were in a cozy corner of the internet.

The interface was mostly in Mandarin, but the content spoke a universal language: cute pets, travel photos (Chinese cities look amazing), people welcoming TikTokers, and enough Chinese food videos to make anyone hungry at 3am.

Then I posted my first photo, and that’s when things got weird.

Within minutes my inbox exploded with messages from supposedly American users. The first red flag? Usually dozens of cute girls don’t bombard me with requests to hook up.

Another strange thing I noticed was that each account had a Nigerian IP address, clearly visible in the account details, although you would miss it if you only looked at the English words in their bio.

Each account also contains details in Mandarin, and if you take the time to review it, you’ll realize that each RedNote account automatically lists the country of origin, with a country code, for the registrant.

Take “Bbyelizabeth0” (ID: 26204885628), who came into my DMs claiming to be a 28-year-old American woman looking for friends.

Her profile featured a beautiful woman doing the typical influencer poses, including my personal favorite: The boudoir mirror selfie.

However, I was sad to learn through a reverse image search that the account had stolen the profile photo and videos of @curlygirlxoxo, an Instagram model with 140,000 followers who combines fitness content with OnlyFans promotions.

Is nothing sacred? Even worse, the video “she” posted on RedNote was stolen from TikTok.

The real model is probably unaware that her identity is being used to scam people all over the world.

I tried to contact her via Instagram but got no response. She was also active on Onlyfans, but since I’m poor, I didn’t contact her there.

She probably doesn’t really care: influencers are constantly plagued by impersonations, and social media sites do little to combat scammers.

The scammers’ playbook became even clearer after the next two messages. “Nancy Adonis” (ID: 26207772180) and “Dana Michael2” (ID: 11558103341) hit me within seconds of each other. Both accounts had Nigerian IP addresses and mirrored biographies: “live and let live” and “happiness is free.”

Their conversation starters could have been copied and pasted: “Hi!” followed by “Do you speak English?” and the inevitable “Where are you?”

These weren’t just random attempts. The scammers had clearly done their homework by using digitally altered photos that were just different enough to escape reverse image searches.

But their compressed videos (probably downloaded and reuploaded multiple times to avoid exact visual matches) gave the game away.

I chatted with Nancy Adonis a little bit. She told me she lived in Boston.

What a coincidence! I told her that I also spent my vacations in Boston. I asked her to be more specific about where she lives in Boston.

She told me she moved to Okinawa, where she cares for military personnel in a hospital. Had I stepped out of World War II into a time warp?

For clarification, she gave me her address so we can meet as soon as she returns.

Apparently she lives in a bar: the Karltan Bar, to be more specific. The perfect girlfriend?

Another interesting case involved a scammer who built a completely fake persona using content from Rockstar Kristin, a food and travel influencer from Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania.

The real Kristin has 83,500 Instagram followers and posts about world cuisine. The fake version just wanted to know my location and liked my smile.

RedNote (left) versus the original Instagram post (right).

I contacted the original Rockstar, Kristin, to alert her to her stolen identity and to confirm if she was the person behind the account.

After all, it’s possible she traveled to Nigeria, bought a phone line, registered her account, complimented my smile, and then traveled back to the US.

Unfortunately, she didn’t respond either.

The scammers are taking advantage of a perfect storm: a sudden influx of Americans protesting TikTok’s ban, coupled with language barriers that make people grateful for any English conversation and an interface strange enough to make users question their instincts.

Many don’t even realize that RedNote has an English translation option—it’s just hidden deep enough in the settings to make new users feel lost.

Take this next example. The normal user interface shows random Chinese characters and appears as if the profile is from the US, according to the biography.

However, when translating the characters you can see that the real country of origin is Nigeria.

People are starting to notice these oddities. “Be aware of scams. This app is now the wild wild east,” warned a RedNote veteran who posted under ID: Daya Redneck, mixing English and Mandarin in his warnings. “Don’t send your personal information, all jokes aside.”

MissKatherine, an American RedNote newcomer, shared her own brush with the scammers.

“Someone said they were American with fake photos, but the IP address was from Nigeria,” she said. When I checked her followers, I found more accounts using the same script, all with Nigerian IP addresses hidden behind stolen American identities.

The flow of new users for RedNote shows no signs of slowing down. The app reached the top spot on Apple’s App Store and reached the top 10 on Google Play within days of the TikTok ban news.

(I doubt TikTok will be banned, as new US President Trump seems more favorable to the app and has invited TikTok’s CEO to the inauguration.)

In the meantime, I think it’s possible that Nigerians really love the RedNote app, and there’s nothing serious going on here.

Although Nigeria is not part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative development initiative, it receives huge amounts of money from China. It is one of the country’s most important economic partners.

Still, RedNote’s environment feels quite rip-off and infested with weird bots. If you want to hang out there, use the simple translation tool and some common sense.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go talk to a hot married woman in my area who wants to give me a million dollars.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair