Happy new year everyone. Now that most of us are off work and have more free time on our hands, this is just a reminder to be safe and take care of yourselves when meeting internet strangers. Hopefully you will find this post useful.

Just remember:

Do not disclose private information and try to remain anonymous until you meet or trust the person

This includes giving out phone numbers, emails, addresses and names. Do not share any social media accounts with your full name and contact list of friends, family and coworkers.

Please read up about sextortion. Blackmailers will often save your contact list and then threaten to release compromising photos of you to those contacts, unless you pay them out.

This is especially important if you have nudes, or are planning on sending nudes. ❗❗Please use a separate dummy account or an anonymous messaging app that is unconnected to your contacts or private info.❗❗ My personal favourites are Discord and KiK as you only need to provide a username to add someone and they are completely anonymous messaging apps.

Personally, I would avoid snapchat as the app doesn’t save your chat logs incase you need it as evidence. Instagram is risky if you forget to switch accounts.

Check the users post history

• The first thing you should do is screen someone's posts and comments for any red flags or inconsistencies.

• If the user has a blank profile, but has accumulated karma, you can use this website to recover some of their deleted comments or posts by searching their username.

I recommend doing a test on your own account first to see if it yields any results. The website is sometimes glitchy so just try again later if you get no results. It also sometimes brings up results with a similar username so make sure to double-check you got the correct person.

• Did you find a thread or comment that was deleted by the user? You can use Unddit to restore those comments/posts (not guaranteed to be archived).

Verify who you are talking to and do this immediately.

• Use Reverse image to check if the photo is unique

• Google their username

• ❗Ask them to verify by taking a live selfie using the app’s camera feature.❗

Some apps like KIK and Instagram have different icons for live pics vs an upload. Unfortunately Discord does not distinguish between the two so this method will not work on Discord.

For example, on kik, a live pic taken with the app camera will have the words ‘camera’ at the bottom, whereas an uploaded photo (which can be faked or filtered) does not. See Exhibit A .

Some examples of the kik app working in real time to prevent catfishers: Exhibit B and Exhibit C

This is a quick and efficient to verify who you are talking to. It is not a fool proof method so I suggest asking for specific poses or multiple photos.

• Video call if the app has this feature

• Ask them to send a written verification using a crumpled paper their username today's date. The crumpled paper is to help you detect any potential photoshop.

See the gonewild pictorial on how to verify.

TLDR: Don't be a dumbass, do some due diligence, verify who you are talking to and happy hump day