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Photos are one of the main types of content today . Do not include unverified photos in your texts and posts, especially if you write about complex social or political topics. Filling the site with content must be competent and of high quality - respect your readers and take care of your reputation.
There are several ways to check whether an illustration is real or a fake photo:
- If you are the proud owner of the Google Chrome browser, then we can congratulate you - the verification will take no more than a minute. Once in your browser, right-click on the suspicious photo and select “Find this image on Google.”
- If you don’t like Google Chrome or don’t have the opportunity to install it, then in this case special plugins will help you: for example, Who stole my pictures (allows you to find a picture in browsers such as Google, Yandex and Tineye).
- But you can check a picture for fakeness even without Chrome and plugins. How? Easily! In any browser, next to the tab in which you have an Internet resource with a suspicious illustration open, you need to open another tab. After that, in the new Google images section. Then return to the previous tab and drag the “suspicious” image into the new tab with the mouse and release it in the search bar.
- In addition, you can check not only images directly from sites, but also those saved on your computer’s hard drive - you just need to drag the photo into the image search bar in Google.
All of the above steps will allow you to determine whether the photo is original or has already been processed in Photoshop, as well as find out the date the picture was published and what is actually depicted in it.
Checking photos for authenticity and the absence of fake photos is the key to your professionalism and the trust of your readership.
With the growth of activity on the Internet and the accessibility of the World Wide Web to an increasing number of users, scammers are proportionately becoming more active.
The most common scams on the Internet are luring (extorting) money through the use of fake sites, phishing sites (trap sites).
It is sometimes quite difficult for an inexperienced user to navigate the vastness of sites and not end up on fake sites.
Many fake websites of banks, auction houses, popular file sharing services, and social networks have been recorded. But there, often, you need to enter passwords, plastic card numbers, and so on. Just imagine that you will provide this confidential data to attackers when you visit a fake site!
Not a single website on the planet is safe from scammers. Moreover, the more popular, visited and protected the original site is, the more likely it is that it will immediately begin to be counterfeited. Numerous fraudulent clones of Odnoklassniki, VKontakte, Facebook, Sberbank and other popular and not so popular portals live online. According to various estimates, there are more than half a million fake sites in RuNet alone!
How to distinguish a fake site from an original site? There are several fairly simple signs that indicate scammers.
1) The main thing is the site address. Fraudsters use different tricks here. For example, there is the official website of the most popular social network Odnoklassniki. The real address looks like this: www.оdnoklassniki.ru. Scammers, trying to deceive the user, register domain names that are as similar as possible to the original, for example:
ABOUT b noklassniki.ru
Odnokla s niki.ru
Odno c lassniki.ru
Odnoklassn e ki.ru
Look carefully at the address! As a last resort, if you still cannot understand whether this is a real address or a fake one, type the phrase “Odnoklassniki official website” in a popular search engine. In the first place will be the original site, which you can go to, or see how correct the address is in your browser
2) Carefully study the content of the site - the presence of layout defects (shifted blocks, pictures, text creeping on top of each other, etc.) and grammatical errors is a clear sign that something is wrong with the site. This is either a fake or a site whose owner is illiterate or skimps on proofreading. In both cases, we believe there is nothing for you to do there.
3) Pay attention to the dates under messages, blocks, news - on fake sites, dates, as a rule, are no longer relevant, news are expired. This can be explained simply - scammers are not very interested in updating sites, and technically it is tedious, because it requires rewriting the page code. With rare exceptions, the fake site does not have real functionality, and only a “photo” of the main page is loaded.
4) Move your mouse cursor over menu items, links, material headings (without clicking). Almost all browsers support the function of directly broadcasting the address of a specific link when you hover the mouse over it - at the top or bottom of the browser the long address of the link that the cursor is hovering over “lights up”. All active link addresses must be different! If the same address is displayed, especially if there is a “stub” at the end in the form of “=” or “#” signs, this is a fake site. Identical addresses mean that no matter where you click, you will go to the same window that the scammers need (for example, asking you to enter a phone number or send an SMS), or nothing will happen (“dead” link).
5) On fraudulent sites, contact information is almost never indicated, there is no feedback form, either it simply does not work, or the information specified in the contacts is a dummy.
6) Fraudulent sites do not have guest pages or forums, and if there are any, either expired messages or all messages are enthusiastically laudatory. Lately, some pretty clever “deceptions” have appeared. The site hosts a guest page, a forum, or even a chat room. You post a message and it immediately appears on the site. However, alas, this is a deception - your message appears only in your browser, but there is nothing on the site. This can be easily checked by simply opening this site from a different browser - your message will not appear. Chat rooms are also often installed. Having entered the site, the user sees that there is active communication there, user messages are actively replacing each other. The user can even post their message, and it will (supposedly) appear in the general feed. However, this is also nothing more than a trick. Your message is visible only to you, and the messages in this chat are the same, broadcast in a circle. Naturally, there is no talk of any live communication; pre-written messages are “rotated” by a special program. Stay on the site a little longer and you will see the same messages repeating in cycles.
7) Real sites do not ask you to send SMS to short numbers! The maximum is a request for your phone number, to which the code is sent. But not the other way around! To protect against spam and robots, the so-called “captcha” has long been successfully used - a security system that asks you to enter symbols, letters, numbers from a picture, perform a certain action (for example, assemble a simple mosaic) or perform a basic arithmetic operation (for example, 2+ 2=?). And the requirement to send SMS to a short number to “check if you are a human” or “this is a regular anti-spam check” is nothing more than nonsense. The most common money scam...
8) Real sites that have paid short number services never lie to the user about the purpose of sending a message to a short number. It always states directly there - watching a movie, special status, gift, access code to content, and so on. In addition, the price is always indicated and a visible and direct link is provided to the service for clarifying the cost of a call or SMS for each operator.
Morality: When going to the desired site, be extremely careful! Using this LINK you can always find out the REAL cost of SMS by simply entering a short number. Don't forget to add our site to your FAVORITES so you don't waste time searching next time.
The site administration recommends installing a new service from Yandex - Elements.Yandex. This service will signal transitions to a fake site.
How to check if honey is real? Pay attention to several signs that are characteristic of exclusively natural beekeeping products:
Appearance. Do you want to test honey at home? Rate his “appearance” using a five-point system. A quality product will not foam or bubble. This is what the fermentation process looks like, and good honey cannot ferment a priori.
Crystallization. After one and a half to two months, honey begins to thicken and become cloudy - this is an absolutely normal phenomenon, indicating its naturalness. Liquid honey can only be bought in the summer during pumping. The only exceptions are heather and acacia honey - the first turns into jelly, the second remains liquid until spring.
Smell. Real honey has a fragrant and incomparable aroma, while counterfeit honey smells absolutely nothing.
Taste. You can check the quality of honey by tasting it on your tongue. A good product has a pleasant and slightly tart taste. It simply melts in your mouth and leaves no sediment or solids behind. You may even feel a slight tingling in your throat and nose - this is another sure sign of high quality.
Color. The shade of this product depends on the variety:
Linden - amber;
Flower honey - light yellow;
Ash – transparent;
Buckwheat – brown;
Linden - amber.
Viscosity. Place a clean, thin wooden stick into the container with the product. Real honey will stretch in a long continuous thread, forming a slowly spreading tower. The fake product will simply flow down, leaving behind only splashes.
Consistency. It is very easy to check the naturalness of honey in a home laboratory - its consistency is delicate and homogeneous. A high-quality product is quickly absorbed into the skin and easily rubbed between your fingers. But the counterfeit product, when rubbed, forms rough and quite hard lumps.
Volume and weight. Honey contains a lot of small particles, and therefore it simply cannot be lighter than water. A liter of honey weighs about one and a half kilograms. Less weight indicates a high water content, which makes it very light.
How to determine the quality of honey
Pure honey is transparent, there is no hint of any sediment in it, regardless of color and variety. Do you want to check if there are any additional impurities or additives in it? You can send your purchase to a laboratory and pay a certain amount for it, or you can check the authenticity of honey at home.
Method 1. Using paper and matches
Drop honey onto a sheet of clean paper and set it on fire. If the honey is really real, the paper will burn, but the drop will remain untouched. If the honey began to burn, melt or darken, then the bees were obviously fed with diluted sugar.
Method 2. Using a chemical pencil
This is another popular method that allows you to determine the quality of honey at home in just a couple of minutes. Apply a layer of product to your finger, spoon or paper and run a pencil over it. You can dip the pencil into a container of sweet nectar. The naturalness of the product is indicated by the absence of any traces on the surface of the paper, spoon or hand.
Method 3: Using blotting paper
Do you want to know if your purchase contains sugar, starch or other additives? Apply a drop of honey to a piece of blotting paper and wait a couple of minutes. Has a watery spot appeared on the back side? This is a bad fake.
Method 4. Using tea
The quality of the product can be checked directly while drinking tea. Just add a spoonful of honey to the cup and let it completely dissolve. If you were not deceived, the liquid will become darker. Will there be sediment in it? With a good medical professional it simply doesn’t exist.
Method 5. Using bread
Honey is characterized by high hygroscopicity. It absorbs not only odors, but also moisture from the environment. Place a slice of fresh bread into the container and check the result after about five minutes. If the honey is real, the bread will not only not get wet, but will also become harder.
Method 6. Using vinegar
Using vinegar and distilled water, you can find out if there is any chalk in your honey. Dilute a tablespoon of the product with half a glass of water, add
Genuine leather is an incredibly wear-resistant material used for the production of clothing, shoes and accessories. Leather items are not cheap. Many manufacturers offer shoes and accessories made from more affordable leatherette. Things made from this material are visually similar to real leather. For this reason, the question becomes relevant: “How to check the naturalness of leather when purchasing?”
Superficial inspection
When choosing any leather product, start with a close inspection. Natural without bends or wrinkles, any deformations can only appear during prolonged wear. Study the relief and surface pattern. One of the simplest ways to check if your skin is natural is to carefully examine the pores. On leatherette they will be smooth and identical. While genuine leather has a unique pattern. Our mothers believed that the best way to identify leatherette was to smell the product. But today natural leather undergoes complex processing. Some types of impregnations kill and mask the natural odor. And yet, natural haberdashery leather cannot have a pronounced, irritating chemical aroma.
Attention to detail: checking the backing and seams
Examine the folds and edges of the product. Real leather is homogeneous and does not flake. Still wondering how to check the naturalness of your leather? Try to find an opportunity to look at its seamy side. Genuine leather will have a fleecy surface. Try to stroke the reverse side, there will be marks on it - these are the fibers that have changed their direction. If the reverse side of the product is woven, it is definitely leatherette. One of the qualities that haberdashery leather has is elasticity. Try to bend or crumple the product; when you straighten it, there should be no bends or wrinkles left. Pay attention to how the item you like is packaged. Manufacturers of genuine leather do not skimp on beautiful boxes and protective wrappers. Very often, a sample of the material is offered with leather products to assess the quality. Studying it is another way to check the naturalness of the skin. If the sample has the shape of a regular rhombus or rectangle, it demonstrates the quality of leatherette. Products made from genuine leather are accompanied by irregularly shaped pieces, symbolizing the skin removed from the animal.
Checking patent leather
Patent leather products look stylish and bright. How to determine the naturalness of a given material? Patent leather, like matte leather, is quite elastic and resilient. Try to crumple the product and straighten it; there will be no wrinkles or bends left on the natural material. Place your hand on the surface of the material. Real leather will keep you warm. Natural material absorbs moisture, while drops of water remain on the surface of the artificial one. However, this method of checking patent leather for naturalness can be considered outdated. Today, leather is often treated with special compounds that make it waterproof. A specific test method is to place your hand on the surface of the product. The artificial polish should make your palm sweat.
Does real skin burn?
One of the most popular options for checking the naturalness of a leather product is exposing it to a fire flame. Don't know how to check leather for naturalness with a lighter? It's very simple - set the product on fire in an inconspicuous place. Leatherette will melt, while genuine leather will remain in its original form. This method is suitable for home testing. You can determine what a product sold as leather is made of by piercing it with a needle. A sewing tool will fit into leatherette with ease. Genuine leather is denser and will not be easy to pierce. Before purchasing, evaluate the uniformity of coloring of the material. Expensive real leather should have an even, pleasant shade. Drawings and prints-stickers can be applied to natural material. If you like just such a product, check it in a place where only background paint is present. And the most important sign of quality: genuine leather cannot be too cheap. Even at sales and discount stores. The production of leather products and pre-processing of the material have a high cost. It is on this basis that the market price of clothing and accessories is formed.
Instructions: How to check a photo for authenticity.
Identifying a fake image is similar to fact checking - the steps are the same, the tools are slightly different. Don’t forget to include logic at the very beginning: could this photo, in principle, have been taken at the time and place with which it is correlated? If the logic is in order, we move on.
Step 1: Is this photo original or not?
What if someone has already posted it before? We check through Google Image Search or TinEye. Google Image Search finds similar images and allows you to sort them by size and date. TinEye makes it possible to compare found images with each other and also shows the file size and the date of its appearance on the Internet.
The better the image size you use, the more likely you are to stumble upon the original faster.
Perhaps the image you are looking for consists of two pieces of composited parts. Divide the image in any graphics editor and look for each part. The image can also be mirrored, so try changing it through the graphic editor in this way and re-searching.
Processed image in Foto Forensics. Source: stopfake.org You can check to what extent the image has been digitally processed through the website Photo Forensics. It finds areas that have been "painted" on an image or inserted into it during editing. After processing, the program produces a photo where the edited fragments will stand out from the others.
Kazakhstan case
Residents of the East Kazakhstan region, according to the portal “News of Ust-Kamenogorsk and East Kazakhstan region”, in mid-July began to receive photos via Whatsapp of hailstones and sheep that they had killed, with a text stating that this happened in their area.
Source: yk-news.kz We turn on the inner skeptic and check it through Google Image Search.
As we can see, the photo of hailstones is used in an event that also occurred in July, more precisely on the 18th in Spain, where there was hail.
Source: Google Image Search Another photo, with killed sheep, was used even earlier - on the image aggregator imgur it dates back to 2015. The image quality there also leaves much to be desired and suggests that the file is also not original.
Source: TinEye In a word, the cataclysm clearly occurred far from Eastern Kazakhstan.
Step 2. Who is the author of the photo?
- What's on his avatar? The photo or image can be checked again through an image search (see step 1).
- When was the account registered? How active is he?
- What videos, comments, posts does the user make? Does he primarily upload his own or other people's images?
- Who is the owner of the site or blog (if the blog is on a separate domain)? You can check through the whois service.
- Are there links to accounts on other social networks, blogs, websites? What user information is there?
- Does the user's information exist on the following sites - Spokeo, Pipl.com, WebMii or LinkedIn? To search in Runet you can use the service people.yandex.ru.
The date of creation of a Twitter account can be viewed through Discover Twitter First Tweet, Vkontakte - through vkreg.ru.
The Twitter function allows you to view the first tweet of any user. Source: Twitter Sometimes you can find out the source of a photo from the file name. If it's a long string of numbers, then the photo was probably taken from social media. For example, some Facebook photos contain in their title the ID of the user who posted it. Let's take, for example, a photo with this link: https://scontent-fra3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtf1/v/t1.0-9/11201814_10205461106940119_1410813217263058502_n.jpg?oh=81a37240658c3d38e 2f96385299ae6a9&oe=563E6830 .
Without a description and a source, it is quite difficult to establish the context in which it was published. But you can find out about it using the file name. This is what the name of a photo uploaded to the Facebook server usually looks like: “11201814_ 10205461106940119 _1410813217263058502_n.” The 15 digits in the middle are the unique number of the user who uploaded the photo. If you write facebook.com/ 10205461106940119, then we will get the address of this user’s page.
Kazakhstan case
Fraudsters do not hesitate to imitate the website of the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Kazakhstan. site, what you need to pay special attention to. In particular - on the author.
Screenshot of the fake website of the Ministry and Health of the Republic of Kazakhstan Step 3. Where and when was the photo taken?
Let's look at the EXIF data of the image. EXIF contains a bunch of details: from the size of the photo to the time it was created, as well as the model of the camera it was taken with and more. EXIF data can be read either through a graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop, or through the Fotoforensics or Findexif websites. In addition to them, there is the JPEGSnoop program (works only for Windows), which allows you to view the metadata of not only images, but also AVI, DNG, PDF, THM formats, and also see whether the image has been edited, identify errors in a damaged file, etc.
However, EXIF data may not always be detectable or may be incorrect. In particular, this concerns the date and time when the photo could have been taken: it is quite possible that the camera was reset to factory settings or a different time zone was set. Photos on social networks may not have EXIF data at all - Facebook, for example, erases it when uploading images.
Geolocation
Another useful geolocation resource is Geofeedia, which searches social media posts by location. The service processes messages from Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Instagram and Picasa sent using GPS and then presents them in the form of a collage. The only negative is that the resource is paid.
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