Sexy Sharon or Hunky Harry is single and wants to meet YOU!
Online dating scams are pretty common and often involve an image of a 'sexy' person. They do a lot of business at this time of year – but so do the scammers, who pretend to be potential partners by using pictures of people from modelling websites. We'll receive a contact from the agency or dating website we joined and a picture and link to the other person's account. Many dating sites have been hacked and dating pages cloned, so it's easy to reproduce any website on a server the attacker controls. What they can't recreate are the genuine users' pictures (although they can copy images on accounts they already hacked) but there's a way to check we are not being scammed. If the image is too good to be true, we can investigate its origin. The same applies to avatars of online accounts we may find suspicious – trolls, cyber criminals, sex pests, etc – all have to submit an avatar to a website and we can investigate a suspect person here too.
As I have said in chapter 4, it is unsafe to open an image in an email in case it's hosting a worm or tracker. But we should be able to right-click the blocked image (it should still appear as a blocked image in its placeholder even if it's deactivated) and copy its location or URL(the long address that leads to the exact place on the web it lives).
Once we have the image's URL, we can easily trace it, or any other image we see on a web page or a social network, by entering or pasting it, or actually dropping the picture itself, into an image checker or reverse image search engine. Reverse Image checkers are great. They're different from search engines that find a suitable image we might want to use in a graphics project or for a web page. We are doing the opposite – trying to trace an image we have already, on our device or on a website we use, to identify its original source. Reverse image search engines reveal all the different websites in which an image appeared, like ever, and who has used it or is still using it. What we'll get is the exact site the image came from originally and, if it's a real person on social media, if their name matches the one on our fake dating site.
Graphic artists and photographers whose work may have been plagiarised often use this tool. We can use it to check out a picture we took of a building, a flower, or a strange insect we came across. Our personal pictures of something we want to check can be identified in most cases. We can also use it to stay safe.
There are many types of these services, mainly run by corporations. Google, Yahoo and Bing have excellent reverse image search engines, but obviously, using them will mean we will have to temporarily allow their trackers. Alternatively, use less creepy products like the Saucenao engine, which is a voluntary run tool, although its database is still small. Another company, Canada's Tin Eye, has billions of images and though it's blocking TOR users is an alternative to Google.
Who's that girl in the avatar?
It's also worth doing this with the avatars of our followers if something doesn't seem right about them. This check will often tell us if they are genuine. If someone we think is a girl and we discover they're using the face of a model taken from a teen fashion site, this could mean they are actually a predator trying to look trendy and deceive us. I mentioned the last example on a forum recently (a person was pretending to be a teen model) and the company immediately closed the account – meaning they probably agreed with my suspicions. Maybe that was bad news for the person but I hate deceit in most forms. Plus, they probably opened another account five minutes later anyway. The clever scammer of course will use untraceable avatars, as will a person who wants to keep their privacy relatively intact. We can't do much about that.
Try using a reverse search to find out where I got my WP avatar. Hopefully it will prove I am a real pigeon. :)
1. Get up your chosen reverse search engine in another window or tab.
2. Drag my avatar from anywhere it appears in WP's architecture
3. Drop it into the image search box. It will also work if we paste a URL or hotlink we got from an unopened email image, into the search box.
Reverse search engines follow the link or URL to the picture and then compare it against millions of online images. Obviously, the bigger the database the more choices we get (Google excels here) and if the image is matched we'll be presented with the list all the places that image has ever been used and who is using it. Sometimes people use a neutral pic, say, of a cartoon character, but we can still find out any other sites where they may use it. Some trolls are truly dumb and use the same avatar for personal social networking sites along with easily trackable user names and profiles. This is how law enforcement and Troll Hunters ('ethical' hackers who enjoy tracking and hacking internet nuisances and sex pests) locate and arrest undesirables, (or how Troll Hunters target a troll's device and destroy it).
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Drop an avatar into a reverse search engine to see if it's legit
LINK 1 Reverse image checkers, search engines and plugins
