14 DAY TRIAL // Scammers often resort to creating fake social media profiles to interact with potential victims, but in some cases, these can be identified by running a simple search of the picture they plaster on their account.
Many users are familiar with the scenario where they receive friend requests from people they do not know, with attractive profile pictures. Sometimes, this type of interaction hides nefarious purposes, though.
There are plenty of cases where victims are approached this way on social networks only to be lured to locations hosting malware or phishing pages.
Searching the profile pic can return surprising results
One way to verify the legitimacy of the profile is to check if the account picture appears in results that have nothing to do with the person. If that’s the case, the profile is most likely a fake one.
Alex Eckelberry, a board member at Malwarebytes security company, found a few scammers trying to enter his circle of friends and contacts on Facebook and LinkedIn.
“I got a very pretty woman friending me on Facebook recently. I don’t get pretty women friending me on Facebook,” he wrote on Monday in a post on his personal website. “Anyway, she looked familiar… and it turned out it was someone using Taylor Swift’s photo,” he continued.
Someone using the name John Kerry sent him a request on LinkedIn, and after running a search on Google Images, he found that the person took a picture of a model promoting modern hairstyles for men.
Beware of requests on social networks from unknown people
The fraudster advertised skills ranging from marketing, SEO, SEM and talent acquisition to business strategy and gave “Digital Marketing Company” (a pretty generic name) as his current workplace.
Unusual interest coming from good-looking people may trigger the alarm bells for some users, but most of the times, they respond positively to the request and risk becoming victims of various online scams.
However, it is worth noting that not all scammers rely on publicly available pictures to make their profile more credible.
