SaveWithLaura and Readies.co.uk – Simple-Minded Trolling

A loan site called Readies has been courting controversy today with a tweet and article suggesting that parents don’t ’embarrass’ their children by buying them school dinners from Aldi. This is backed up with an article that suggests you rein in your spending enormously by merely shelling out £10 per day on the little blighters – a huge drop from the £15 in cash someone called @savewithLaura usually gives them. For some reason Laura is using a stock photo as her profile picture.

There’s a flamebaiting article that follows that ticks all the required boxes of snobbishness, entitlement and rank stupidity. Needless to say this has pushed some buttons on Twitter, where people have bought this idea that it’s a genuine article written by a genuine person for a genuine loans company.

It isn’t. It’s trolling – at best it’s an extremely weak and unfunny satire. It’s just about possible that Readies.co.uk is a genuine loan site that’s deliberately trolling people on social media in order to raise some cheap publicity and generate click-thrus via what is actually a decent info-scraping app; if not then it’s either an outright scam or a simple-minded wind-up. The fact that they appear to have a Lamborghini Gallardo as the main prize in a competition should have alarm bells ringing.

Proof? Well the article is so ridiculous it couldn’t possibly be real – even Katie Hopkins would baulk at the idiocy on display. Secondly it comes from a list of articles along similar lines, with titles such as How I Learned to Feed a Family of Four on £500 a Week. Presumably they play better than turgid articles called UK Banks Barely Pass Eurozone Stress Tests – Other Banks Barely Pass English.

What’s more a cursory glance at Laura’s tweets over the last few weeks reveal some feeble tricks of the trade for those intent on getting a rise out of Twitter. Two whit:

Trolling Scots

Animal cruelty

Twattiness

Racism

Sexism

Trolling scousers

Race hate

Domestic violence

Similar money-baiting drivel

Get angry if you want, but you’re winding yourself up over a student project, an effort to make quick cash or giggling fat bloke who has nothing better to do.