EXIF, stage left.

[Wayne]

I'm a huge fan of free software and websites that can be used to check if something's a scam. IrfanView is a program I've particularly loved for a long time. How long? I'm glad you asked. I first started using it as my default image viewer over 20 years ago and have installed it (along with VLC as my media player) on every PC I've built in all that time. One of the things that makes IrfanView so handy is the fact you can install a plugin pack that gives it a bunch of extra options. One of those is the ability to see the EXIF data of an image. EXIF data is basically the hidden data that tells whatever system that you use to look at the image when it was taken, what camera/phone it was taken with, what settings it used etc. Basically it's all the info you don't need to know about in order to view an image, but is handy to check out if you're into that kind of thing. I'll tell you a quick story here that I've mentioned before but is always worth repeating. Way back in about 2007 on another site a baiter posted up an image that a scammer had sent them. Using the EXIF data actually showed me what the original image was before the scammer Photoshopped over his own face with the face of the person he was pretending to be so I shared it in the thread. Imagine how freaked out the scammer was when they replied back with his own face!

Cue today. I've used IrfanView to check the EXIF data out for many years, but today it showed me something I had no idea it could do. Thinking about it, it was obvious it should be able to do it, but I'd just never seen it until now. A scammer sent me the usual bullshit email with an image, pretending to be a female wanting to date me. My default image viewer is - as I've already said - IrfanView, so I opened it up there. This time I decided to do a double check of the EXIF data and it showed me something that made identifying who they'd stolen the image of so much easier. It actually showed a link to the Instagram page the image was stolen from. Copy and pasting the link into my browser told me exactly who the image was really of. I also had a second (and a third, but it was identical to the second) email that used another picture of the same person, stolen from the same IG account. Interestingly, the image search sites I use drew a blank on where the image was originally from.

It's like email headers. People probably never look at them 99% of the time, but learning how to find them can sometimes give you results that blow the scammer's story apart. It's worth learning what these typically "hidden" things are, how to find them and what you can glean from them. A quick peep can sometimes not only tell you what you need to know, but some extra stuff too.

If you click on the image below it'll show you exactly what I saw when checking out the EXIF info.