A short instructional talk (YouTube video transcript) by Alec Couros demonstrating how to use Google Images' reverse image search to identify fake Facebook profiles and detect romance/catfishing scams. He walks through saving a profile photo, uploading it to images.google.com, and interpreting matches (e.g., his own Twitter and blog), and emphasizes teaching this critical digital literacy to students, parents, and administrators.
Chapters
On how you can use Google reverse image search to detect a scammer on Facebook. Alright, so this is my profile on Facebook, but there are a number of scammer profiles that are using my photographs such as over this guy over here, Pyles S. Jackson. As you notice, these are my children and photographs of me. Sad. I'm writing a blog post on this at the moment which I'll share soon. Here's another version. So Hezekiah Palmer and these are actually kind of difficult to get down. Facebook doesn't have a really good reporting tool to get these things down. But if you're actively talking to someone on Facebook and you've. And you're wondering if this person is legit, this is what a lot of people have actually used to find out who the actual person is. This is used when you think that the photos are fake. Maybe you're falling for a catfishing scam or romance scam. I can explain those more if you contact me. But anyway, this is becoming a real problem. So in this particular case what I'm going to do is click on the COVID photo. So there's me. So I've got a photograph here. And what you can actually do, I'm using Chrome browser. You won't be able to see the whole thing, but I'm going to drag and drop this to the outside on my desktop. So I'm just leaving it on my desktop. I've saved it there and what I'm going to do is go to just Google. So I'm going to go to images.google.com and what I'm going to do here is click on the little button here and what you can actually do is just drag and drop that photograph onto your from your desktop. Just drag it in there and. And what that does is actually searches for that image. So I'll just click on that and so it uses that as a reverse search. And you'll notice the first thing that comes up is me on Twitter, my blog, lots of other photos. For me there's actually even something that's called Romance Scam, which is a website that reports scams such as romance Scams that are happening in this particular case. So you can actually find a lot more. So it's pretty easy just by using a photograph and being a bit critical and skeptical I guess to figure out that that particular person that you're talking to is not actually Alec Koros or the person that you're wanting to talk to. So I hope this is useful. This is something that I would really share with a lot of students. If your teachers, teachers, administrators, parents, children of all ages. I think it's really important to understand this is a fairly important critical literacy to start looking at the idea of using a reverse image search to verify identity. So thanks for listening.
