Scammers In The House

A friend of mine nearly fell for a scam a few days ago. It was a quite well done scam, and would have passed through too, if it wasn't for the fact that the young lady was quite vigilant.

About two months ago, a guy contacted her on her Facebook account and sent her a friend request. She didn't know the guy but accepted the request anyway. Making friends on Facebook has become kind of like meeting someone on a bus. You may end up with a friend, you may end up with a romantic relationship, you may end up waking in a tub full of ice in a sleazy motel with your kidneys missing.

The person seemed quite nice and was friendly. Emails turned to chats, chats turned to Skype sessions. She noticed discrepancies in his story, and that put her on her guard, but she maintained the friendship anyway.

The guy spoke many times about his son, and that his wife had died of cancer 3 years ago. When my friend told me this, it set off my alarm bells. Cancer is a horrible disease, and people who get it suffer before they die. I am not lessening the suffering that other diseases bring, but cancer hits at a very visceral part of our psyche. So it is a major tool used by scammers.

He said that he was living in the US but his 16-year-old son was living in the UK. Somehow this didn't jibe either. And my friend noticed that he didn't have an American or British accent on Skype. His accent sounded more African, and the pictures of him were all Anglo.

I found it suspicious that his email address was his first name and his current age. Nobody puts their current age in a long-term email account. It's only relevant for that year.

As the days went by, he told her that he was coming to her country, and that he would be glad to meet her. My friend was not sure about this, so she was noncommittal about meeting. He sent her pictures of him, and his son. She even got an email claiming to be from his son telling her how wonderful it was that she and his father were getting along.

She sent me the mail, and the pictures, but none of the pictures raised any red flags with me. They should have. The son's email on the other hand was more interesting. The style of writing was more appropriate for a 7 year old's school essay than a teenager.

Curiouser and curiouser

A few days ago she got an email from the guy. Apparently he was on his way to her country to work on a contract. He had landed in India and was waiting at the hotel for his son's arrival when he received the news that he had been in a car accident on the way from the airport. The driver had died, and the son had a broken leg and minor internal injuries. They were getting a doctor down from Singapore to check the son out. The bill was going to be close onto USD6500.

The plot thickens.

He didn't want any money, he just wanted to be able to get the company he was working for to be able to give her a cheque in her name and then have her cash it and deposit it to him.

Are the alarm bells going off yet?

She, quite obviously, refused.

He went on to tell her the sob-story, and even went so far as to send a picture of his son in hospital with a bandage on his head. He refused to tell her the name of the company he was supposed to be working for, and didn't want them to know that his child was with him because it was apparently against his contract to bring his child with him.

It was about that time that I was fully brought into the picture. She had told me that she was talking to a guy and she didn't trust him, but this was a whole new level of bullshit.

Obviously alarm bells started going off in my head. My friend is smart enough not to accede to the guy's request, but it was eating her up inside - the entire what if this person is right can be a big weight on your conscience.

Thankfully he had sent a picture of his son in hospital. So Yours Truly submitted it to tineye.com, an image reverse search engine. You upload an image and they will see if it matches against their database of images (1,647,128,150 when I last checked) to see if it is in use anywhere else on the net.

I had used TinEye against the other images and not come across any positives, but with this last image, I got lucky. The picture of his son in hospital was a picture of a Pakistani boy who was caught in the war. If any more proof were needed that the guy was a fake that was enough. My friend blocked him on chats, and reported the profile to FaceBook as a scammer.

But I should have caught it sooner.

The TinEye search was just the start of it. I should have checked the EXIF data on the images he sent. When I went through them (using the FxIF plugin for Mozilla Firefox), I found that most of them had no such data, and the few that had the data had creation dates from many years ago. Hindsight is 20/20.

I can't teach people how not to fall for these scams. When you teach them how to block one, another 10 pop up in its place. But for this kind of scam, it is good to know the resources you can use.

It is good to have a healthy dose of suspicion, especially if you are a young woman, because they are the people who are most targeted by the bleeding heart/sympathy scams. If your gut feeling is that the person is bullshitting you and scamming you, then go by the basis that he is.

Good luck, and stay safe.

UPDATED 2010/08/12

Looks like this post has made somewhat of a stir. I have just heard of a young lady who has used tineye to find that her boyfriend was just scamming her with fake pictures etc.

I would also like to talk more about EXIF data.

EXIF data is written to an image when it is taken by a camera. It usually has the make and model, the date and time, the settings, the original size, and other data about the image. Some of them even have the latitude and longitude on them.

If the image was taken with a digital camera (even if it was the crappy little one on your phone) it will show EXIF data. If it was scanned it might show it. But EXIF data will not show on most manipulated images. If it has been worked on with image editing software there is a good chance it will not.

Most images on the internet do not have EXIF data. So if someone send you an image and says that it is a picture s/he took, there is a very high chance that the EXIF data is there. If it isn't, i would recommend you look at it with more skepticism.