Where is the person you’re talking to located? Are they who they say they are? To check, you can have that person click a special link. You’ll see their IP address, and that will tell you their rough location.
How IP Tracking Links Work
We recently played along with a fake job recruiter scam. We knew at the start this was a scam, but we wanted to confirm the scammer’s location. They said they were in the US—but were they? We checked by tracking their IP with a link.
There’s nothing special about this—when someone accesses a resource online, the server sees their unique IP address. And IP addresses are tied to rough geographic areas. But popular web services don’t usually show you the IP address of that person, although you could certainly see it yourself if you were hosting your own web server. The method here uses an online service that “wraps” a real link for you, tracking the IP address that accesses it before quickly sending the person to the real target of the link.
This has its limitations. Anyone can use a VPN to mask their real location. But, even if they are, there’s a good chance the VPN will show a different location from where they claim to be. In the case of our fake job recruiter, the scammer claimed to be in the US, but they accessed our link from an IP address based in Nigeria.
If you don’t already know the location someone claims to be from and are just trying to figure out whether they’re genuine, you’ll need to convince the person to say where they are before sending them the link. Working that into conversation shouldn’t be too tricky, the nature of the internet makes asking for location a routine part of an online discussion—does anyone else remember A/S/L?
Once you do, you’ll need to prepare a digital file to send them. A picture, a Word document, or anything you can attach to a cloud storage link will do. If you’re dealing with a possible scammer, that scammer might ask you to send them something as part of a scam. If you’re dating online, you might want to send a photo. Once you’re ready to send a file, you’ll need to wrap that normal link with an IP tracking service.
Unfortunately, that process creates a link that’s obviously for tracking. You’ll need to use another service to hide that. You probably don’t want the other person to spot your trick.
RELATED: Scam Alert: Fake Job Recruiters Tried to Catfish Us, Here’s What Happened
How to Create a Disguised Tracking Link
You can use a link to any web page online, but this process will guide you through creating a link that goes to one of your files or photos.
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Source : How to Track Someone’s IP (and Location) With a Link
