How-to Avoid Being Scammed Online

Reverse Image Search Tricks

Learn why reverse image search and live images are not always trustworthy.

Episode #12-30 released on April 1, 2022

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Unless you have lived under a rock in the last 20 years, you are probably aware of Photoshop and images created by AI, all of which can be made to look incredibly real. And combined with the modern age of social networking and dating websites; there is a huge increase in the number of fake accounts used to push all kinds of propaganda and spearfish unsuspecting individuals. And this does not even begin to include the use of real time filters, like those for TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, etc.

The question you may be asking is why. There are a multitude of reasons you may come up with, but the end game always comes down to money. Whether there is a political reason, or a competitive reason, does not matter, in the end, the goal is revenue. This is why you see a lot of people falling prey to misinformation scams of all sorts. Too many have fallen for the information they have found on social media without looking any further. This is, also, a problem on dating apps.

And on dating apps, there is a surge of sugar babies coming out of the woodwork, all looking for a supposed sugar daddy, which is any adult who would pay cash for literally no benefit. And the majority of you may take photos you are getting from them at face value, especially if you can supposedly confirm they are live, but there is a problem with that. There is absolutely no guarantee that any image is live, and that a live feed is real. There have been instances of video feeds having filters that have failed exposing in one case, an older woman pretending to be a young woman. And, in the case of photos, what would you do? You would do a reverse image search, right?

There is a trick where you flip an image trick to trick reverse image search engines to prevent a reverse image search from working, and you would have to re flip the image to see the result, but then there is the possibility of changing tints, skewing the image, applying filters, etc. Meaning that there is a distinct possibility that a picture looks like someone real, but it is manipulated to the point where most reverse image search processors will no longer treat it the same as the original.

And even plenty of applications and tools that are plenty capable of photo search and identification, the most prudent thing we can do is to ask questions, and always question the authenticity of anything and everything online. Is there a net benefit to the person on the other side, do they benefit in any form of monetary fashion, is the communication the least bit controversial, is the information doctored, etc. In those cases, it is possible you are being scammed. In fact, you are more likely to be scammed than anything else online, especially on social networking websites and dating applications, and therefore, the best advice you can ever get is this, do not give out any personal information or send any money to any person, you have never met, and at least this, will significantly reduce the amount of monetary fraud you will experience. And, if anything you read online seems to anger or go against what most people consider as reasonable, then it is likely not true. Never search the internet with the intent to prove yourself right, always search for the intent to learn the truth about the subject or person who want to learn about. At least this way, if the person on the other end has gone as far as the manipulate keyword search results but going as neutral as possible on the search you are more likely to get a more diverse result back. And always check the sources.

Host : Steve Smith | Music : | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Dot Net

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