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

SIf you’ve played The Sims before, the words “motherlode”, “rosebud” and “kaching” are certainly very familiar to you. For the uninitiated, this is 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, these codes are supposed to make us miraculously earn money, meet the love of our life, be healthy or get the body of our dreams effortlessly.

To use them, nothing could be simpler: just recite the sequence of magic numbers of your choice out loud, or write it on a sheet of paper or with your finger pointing it in the air. Here, here.

Already many followers across the Atlantic

If this new trends makes you want to smile (or bang your head against a wall, as you like), it already has many followers across the Atlantic. This is the case of the TikTokeuse anilasita172,000 subscribers, who tells in one of his videos how luck smiled on him after using a cheat codes.

“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 there, I arrive at the supermarket, and there is a trolley waiting for me with a room 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. “Code 55515 made my pain disappear, it didn’t cure me permanently but my pain went away“, says a user in the comments of another video dedicated to the phenomenon.

Further in the comments, another TikTokeuse explains that the codes serve as a substitute for her allergy medication: “I literally used the allergy code instead of a decongestant two days ago – I haven’t had any issues 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 trendswhich literally means “manifest”, is taken from the book The secret by author Rhonda Byrne. Published in 2006, the book takes up the basics 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 her” 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?