As we all know Valentine’s Day is on the 14th of February where people around the world will interact with their lovers sending romantic messages through social media’s like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on. Some lovers go out on this day to spend time together whilst others who have distance lovers spend time chatting with their lovers online. If you are looking for love online, you are at risk of losing more than your heart as you could easily fall a victim of internet fraud on valentine’s day especially when you have met a lover you haven’t confirmed his/her true identity yet. Internet scammers make use of this opportunity to get money/expensive gifts from their so called lovers as valentine is usually a special day for two lovers.
Ahead of Valentine’s Day, the FBI has warned Americans to beware of romance scammers who set up their trick and plans this time of the year.
Going over chat rooms and social media’s, looking for who will fall into their trap posing as Americans working in the military somewhere in a Syria or anywhere U.S military are being sent to serve their country. They could also pose as a sportsman working or traveling abroad, romancing their victims persuading them into substantial loans before vanishing. This is a warning from the FBI as it is known that over 15,000 romance scams were discovered by the FBI in 2016, you can imagine how much People who fell a victim to these scammers lost. It is said that almost $230million was lost the year before.
Unknown to the victims, their suitor’s enticing and attractive photos are often stolen from social media’s like Facebook, Instagram, military sites and sport sites posing as the actual person to lure people into being scammed by their persuasive words. Everyday technology keeps improving for the betterment of mankind and the world. However an innovative app has been developed to filter out scammers and reduce the rate of online scamming especially the dating aspect and romance. This innovative app was developed by the image authentication company Trupic, allows you to find out whether your suitor is actually real or if you are being played.
The CEO of truepic and co founder Jeff mcgregor went further saying “whether you are buying something online or looking at a dating site, there’s so much fraud that it is impossible to identify the real from the fake”. With the help of truepic, you could easily know if your online lover is real by telling them to take a picture from the truepic app and if the person refuses to do so then it should be clear that you were about falling a victim of scamming. So how does Truepic works? Truepic creates a digital photo notary says Jeff mcgregor for images that verifies photos at the point of capture. Why this is so important is online scammers rarely show their faces giving all sort of excuses and lies when asked to take a picture of them right a way. Most of the time they use images stolen from the internet to deceive their victims that this photo was recently taken but do not worry, Truepic got you all covered baby.
If you are really interested in someone online, you can ask them to send you a picture from truepic in order to confirm their true identity so you know you are definitely having an affair with the right person online, if they refuse to do so or they vanish away into a thin air haha, then you will probably know it was a setup to be scammed.
The truepic app is said to work after downloading a free copy of the app, someone snaps a photo, but his or her camera is only the lens, the image is taken by a software camera on Truepic’s server, the server does a rapid data analysing the image, saving the data, time and location of the photos and encodes them on a bitcoin blockchain a digital ledger maintained across a network of computers for maximum security. The entire process takes only about 12 seconds says co founder Stack and creates a permanent immutable image that no one can manipulate.
That way, no one can send you a current picture of chilling in the beach in Los Angeles when when he is actually sitting somewhere with his computer trying to make you fall a victim from overseas.
With the development of Truepic app, People who are really interested in online dating can make use of this app as an advantage to them. They can play it safe by telling their partner to send them a selfie or whatever using the truepic app in order to verify the aunthenticity of the person. Be it valentine’s day or not true pic will help reduce the rate of fraudulent activities online if only people are aware of it. As we all know technology is advancing as the day goes by where new apps, new discoveries are being presented to the world for their usage such as the truepic. The rate of online scam has widen in such a way people can’t even recognize what is real and what is fake online. Everyone seems to be too careful as to not fall a victim of internet fraud, I strongly believe with the help of truepic, internet scam especially acting and covering a fake mask to extract money/expensive gives from people could be brought down to its feet and I believe advance measures are coming on the way to bring internet fraud to its feet. Don’t fall a victim of online dating, ask your so call partner to send you a picture using Truepic, that way one can be assured he or she is on the safe side.