I want to share with everyone just how easy it is to create fake earnings screenshots like the above. Not because I want you to do this (please don’t) but to spread awareness of scammers doing these things.
“Be a lion amongst sheep”
This phrase, or some variation of it, is something I often see from the internet money-making gurus.
A person that views others as sheep is unlikely to be stopped by their morals from faking their income.
Just to be clear I don’t think that anyone on Medium is doing this. But other social media channels are rife with it.
10 seconds are all it takes
Many people still think Photoshop is required to create fake screenshots. And they assume there is some difficulty involved to use exactly the same fonts, font size, and font-weight, and to position your faked text exactly where it should be. Therefore, many would not be bothered doing it.
But it really is a lot simpler than that, because you can just edit the text on any web page by changing the code in your browser.
You can do this with Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and any other platform.
Here’s all you need to do:
- Right-click on an element you want to change and click Inspect.
- Find the text you want to change in the code, click edit as HTML or double click the text.
- Input any value you want, and press enter
There is an even faster way if you want to make every element on the page editable all at once.
- Open Console with Ctrl+Shift+J (on Windows) or Cmd+Option+J (on Mac)
- Write
document.designMode = “on”; - Edit any text you want.
What can we do to verify the truth?
- Ask for a short video or gif of them refreshing the page.
- Make sure all the other numbers add up. They should have the views to support the sales.
- Use your gut instinct to judge if a person is telling the truth.
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