We're on a roll with fake verification photos from scammers this week. Here's another one that's worth making yourself aware of.
This was submitted a few minutes ago: https://i.imgur.com/z4S180r.png. Let's put aside the unlikeliness of two 40-something women looking for a young naked guy for some vague party for the moment.
Interestingly, the user had a photo on their profile with the following image: https://i.imgur.com/mR7eeSX.jpg. (As you'll see below, this was posted publicly by the person in it so I'm not redacting any of it here).
It looks decent enough, but there's a few problems here:
- The paper in the photo is not crumbled. That makes it easy to fake or put whatever text you wanted on it. Although the handwriting does look real so that gives it some more credibility.
- The woman in the photo doesn't look 42 as the post claimed to be.
- The photo is supposedly for r/toastme, but it was posted on their profile directly rather than in that subreddit.
I removed the post based this alone, but let's go a bit further. A quick Google reverse image search reveals this post from a few months ago from a user with a similar username: https://old.reddit.com/r/toastme/comments/tvbbpq/its_my_22nd_birthday_today/
Which appears to be where the photo was stolen from. It's a good photo to steal too: the paper in the photo is easy to Photoshop. In this case, just chop off the last two characters of the username, make a new account with that name, and bam, you have a decent fake verification photo.
So, if you're asking for a verification photo don't accept anything that doesn't have text that you specify on it and be wary of photos that are easy to Photoshop text onto. Above all else though, the best rule applies for spotting these scammers: if it's too good to be true, it is.
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- 1 year ago
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