Until recently, creating fake personalities on the Internet was tricky because in a social media world, we want to see the pictures of the people we follow. Without a picture, a user account on the Internet could be anyone. The computer security professional posting to a tech forum could be a kid in his mom’s basement. A fourteen-year-old girl in a chat room could be an undercover cop. The oil heiress in your in-box is undoubtedly a scam artist. But if we can see a picture, we tend to be less suspicious. Fake accounts sometimes use stock photos or images scraped from the Internet—but these
...more
