Verified by 
Key points
- There was an 80 percent increase in online scammers between 2020 and 2021, indicating a rise of deceptive online predators.
- Teaching teens to spot deceptive online users is a secondary, passive, and likely ineffective intervention as identity duplicates abound.
- In an age of deception, flagrant lies, and online predators, the only effective safety strategy is verification.
You already knew there were "creepers" and untrustworthy people online but it’s likely to get worse.
Just recently there was a young girl in Riverside, California who was abducted after the perpetrator had murdered her mother and grandparents. The man had attained her address by pretending to be a teenager, an online threat called catfishing.
What is catfishing? To catfish is to copy other people’s photos and present yourself as them online. The FTC reported an 80 percent increase in romantic scams from 2020 to 2021 that many times use similar deceptive techniques.
Need an example of catfishing? Look no further than Nev Schulman’s show Catfish on MTV. The show is in its eighth season because teens and adults alike continue to be targeted by criminals and the unwell alike.
The duplicating of identities on social media is a huge problem with no clear solution in sight.
Just in the past month, two of my influencer friends with 100k+ followers on Instagram have been targeted. Their face, their videos, and their identities were copied and pasted into new accounts that had amassed thousands of followers fraudulently.
It’s not just influencers who are targeted. Most of the victims on MTV’s Catfish do not have blue checkmarks verifying their accounts. These folks are just typical social media users.
We all need a more safe, more transparent, and verifiable online experience.
In an age of deception, flagrant lies, and online predators, the only effective safety strategy is verification.
If the young girl in Riverside had known she was talking to an almost 30-year-old guy in Virginia, it's unlikely she would have confided such details as her home address.
It’s time for technology companies to introduce verification as a security benefit of their product.
While Elon Musk at Twitter attempts to make a profit off verification, other platforms are introducing it as a central security feature.
Hinge, a leading online dating app, verifies any user for free within hours. The feature is key in a landscape with a plethora of romantic scammers on dating platforms.
The same security of verification should be provided to all of us on all major social media apps.
Until that happens, here are my top four online safety tips to help prevent you and your children from being catfished:
- For kids, have them not friend anyone they haven’t met first in person and keep their profiles with the highest privacy settings. Encourage your kids to tell you about any new friends they meet on social media.
- For teens who will likely meet people for the first time online, tell them to verify who they’re talking to if they start talking more often. A quick video call will do the trick—this is an excellent dating safety strategy as they get older.
- If you’re an adult talking to another adult who you met online, glance at the person’s profile to look for 1) consistency in photos and "voice" and 2) other people in photos with the person who is tagged.
- Don’t send personal information or photos that would allow someone to identify your home address (i.e. photos with your house/apartment number on them).
