As a predominantly visual species, we tend to believe what we see. Throughout human evolution, our primary sense of sight has allowed us to analyse primeval threats. We are genetically hardwired to process and trust what our eyes tell us.
This innate hardwiring means that the arrival of digital images has posed a problem for the fraud investigation community. There are many different reasons why someone would want to
maliciously alter a photo to ‘tell a different story’. Although photos can be manipulated with ease, many people still harbour a natural tendency to trust photos as a true and accurate representation of the scene in front of us.
The article published in Computer Fraud & Security describes how images may be altered and the techniques and processes we can use to spot photos that have been modified. With the right tools and training, exposing doctored images in fraud investigations is now not only financially and technically viable, but urgently necessary.
