Little China World - Penpal and Language Exchange Warnings, Important Information, and Rules
This open site is a free and growing resource for the Chinese and Western Penpal and Language Exchange. Its value comes from the fact that information - free of charge - is posted and can be viewed by thousands of people all over the world. But please be aware that we don't know them - we really don't - and that we don't endorse any post or guarantee their validity.
We live in a beautiful world, but there is the occasional voyeur or psycho. For example, if you are a young and beautiful female and you add your post, don't add your telephone number because you will receive unwanted calls. Just provide a "throw-away" email address. And of course don't provide your street address! Nobody should provide their street address on the Internet.
Scams
And there is the occasional crook! If you don't already know about it, google the two words "Nigerian Letter", or read Advance Fee Fraud on Wikipedia. Also see our Scam Alert board where you will find examples of scam emails and where you can post info and questions about scams.
When you have doubts about an email, you can at least check if it was actually sent from the country/city where the sender pretends to be located. You can find at aruljohn.com useful advice on how to find an IP address from an email header and how to track the IP address (also at ip2location.com).
Identity Theft
Before you post personal and contact info, like on any web site, be aware that it will be viewed all over the Internet and might be copied and used for unwanted purposes, starting with identity theft. Omit credit file info like date and place of birth, full name, full address, passport number, etc. See for example this interesting CNN video about job searchers who put too much personal information on their online resumes.
Here is some advice about identity theft:
For credit theft, crooks need your address, phone number and name as in your credit file. So, NEVER give out info that is in your credit file.
Search Engine Caches
Did you know that even after you delete your post from a site, it remains in the cache of the search engines and can still be viewed in their search results as a 2-line snippet and/or as a full cached document?
Spam
We STRONGLY suggest that you provide a "throw away" email address (like a gmail, yahoo, hotmail account opened just for your job search) on your posts, knowing that you can get rid of it when you start receiving too much spam. If you include the email address of your references on your resume, they will receive a lot of spam - it's not a nice thing to do to them. If you add your email address only in the Email Address box on the posting forms of our boards, your email address will be protected by a 6-character code against email extracting robots that create mass e-mailing lists (but not against manual extraction).
Your Privacy
The LittleChinaWorld.com does not send spam in any way, directly or indirectly, and does not maintain emailing lists. Spammers sometimes use our name as an introduction ("I got your email address from your profile on LittleChinaWorld.com"). This is a scam. We do not maintain profiles of our posters; there are only individual posts on our site, that their poster can delete any time. And we don't provide anybody with the contact info of our posters - the scammers/spammers find them on the posts. Also, some scammers will contact our posters pretending to be from LittleChinaWorld.com, asking personal info in order to update your profile: No such thing! If you have a doubt, check with us here.
Helping Others
Reporting problems on discussion forums, ours and others, helps other people to avoid the same traps. It really helps a lot!
Reporting Problems
If you see something wrong on our site (scam, dishonest person, etc.), please send us an email because we don't want them.
Contact Us
We welcome your emails. We carefully review each email we receive.
Note: Because between 300 and 500 spam messages arrive each day in the Spam folder, we don't review our Spam folder (reading 500 dirty and scam titles every day is a serious energy vampire - we prefer to use that energy to keep improving this site). Please add a subject line to your email because otherwise your email could end up in our Spam folder. And please make sure your email address is not flagged as spam.
Conclusion: Whether you use, post or send info, and before accepting any contractual relationship, please be vigilant, conduct your own full research, check references, speak to teachers or ex-teachers of the school, and look for advice when needed. And again: Never send money!
By using this site, you agree that we bear no responsibility regarding any info on this site.
We hope that you will enjoy this site, and we sincerely wish you all the best. The team of the LittleChinaWorld.com
We welcome your feedback - Click here to send us an email
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