
Once you do, you’ll need to prepare a digital file to send them. 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? 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. 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. But, even if they are, there’s a good chance the VPN will show a different location from where they claim to be. Anyone can use a VPN to mask their real location.

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. 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. And IP addresses are tied to rough geographic areas. There’s nothing special about this-when someone accesses a resource online, the server sees their unique IP address. They said they were in the US-but were they? We checked by tracking their IP with a link.

We knew at the start this was a scam, but we wanted to confirm the scammer’s location. We recently played along with a fake job recruiter scam. How IP Tracking Links Work Wait a minute: They said they were in the US, but this says Nigeria!
